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In a white tent erected on the parking lot north of the grandstand at Golden Gate Fields, Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso unveiled his preliminary plans for an open air shopping complex he wants to build at the site.

The colorful drawings and carefully scaled plans projected on the screen behind Caruso as he spoke offered up the vision of a development with open spaces and plazas—including a modest amphitheater sculpted into the slope leading up from the shops to the race track grandstand area.

Caruso Affiliated Holdings, a limited liability corporation, has teamed with Canadian auto parts magnate Frank Stronach’s Magna Entertainment, the owner of the race track property, with each putting up half the funding for the project, he said.

A handful of reporters and photographers showed up for the noon press conference, outnumbered by Caruso executives and representatives of former East Bay Democratic Assemblymember Dion Aroner’s AJE Partners, the lobbying firm representing the developers.

“We met with 14 neighborhoods and held hundreds of meetings with officials and representatives of groups,” Caruso told the reporters. “We listened to the community and we have tried to give them what they wanted.”

Among the community’s dislikes, he said, were the expanse of 1.2 million square feet of paved parking lots and the perception that the area around the waterfront is inaccessible, unsafe and filled with litter.

Asked how his project would compare with the Bay Street Emeryville project, Caruso responded, “This is the antithesis of Bay Street in Emeryville. This is everything it isn’t.”

While the square footage of both projects is similar, Caruso said the Emeryville complex is built to the wrong scale and suffers from a variety of other problems, including poorly conceived architecture and complicated traffic ingress and egress.

His project, Caruso said, “is all about outdoor space, about public space, and will feature architecture that reflects the local community,” pointing to Solano Avenue and Berkeley’s Fourth Street shopping areas.

Caruso said the project’s new buildings, currently planned to encompass 344,700 square feet of the surface, combined with the 87,120 square feet of the grandstand, will cover only 11 percent of the 4.6 million-square-foot Magna property within the Albany portion of the Magna property.

The project also includes, among other features:

• A site for a boutique hotel overlooking the bay.

• A farmers’ market in a Victorianesque glass-enclosed arcade.

• 150 to 200 apartments above the retail spaces.

• Restored beaches, featuring a boardwalk trail along the waterfront.

• Completion of the Bay Trail along the waterfront.

• Picnic areas.

• A four-acre park at Fleming Point, complete with a restored pier leading out into the bay.

• 24,000 square feet of community space, including what he hopes will be a facility for the YMCA.

• And, if one of the most popular requests is granted, his Albany project could bring a Nordstrom’s to the shores of the East Bay.

“We want this to reflect what the community has asked for,” he said.

Caruso’s plans call for keeping the development 200 feet from the shoreline, twice the minimum distance set by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

He said he will not be involved in any development on the southern parking lot area that lies over the Berkeley border, which is already scheduled to include the Gilman Play Fields and has also been proposed as the site of a hotel.

Caruso acknowledged some major issues still need to be addressed, including traffic along the heavily traveled bayside corridor.

“We are responsible for the mitigations,” he said, adding that one alternative under consideration was a shuttle to take shoppers to Solano Avenue and to a nearby BART station.

Thursday’s press unveiling preceded three invitation-only presentations for selected members of the Albany public who attended a series of informational meetings and other gatherings Caruso sponsored to solicit input for his plans and win over the community.

Two were held in the tent later in the day, and the third is planned for 3 p.m. today (Friday).

Environmentalists respond

The project still faces considerable opposition from environmental groups, who see extensive development and extensive water sports near the state park land at the Albany Bulb and along the shoreline as a threat both to the margins of the bay and to the habitats of endangered and threatened species like the clapper rail and the burrowing owl.

“We think building a mall on the shoreline is a ridiculously bad idea, and the Sierra Club is in complete opposition,” said Norman LaForce, the organization’s Bay Area spokesperson.

“We have been planning for a park there for the last 25 years,” said Bill Dann, co-chair of Citizens for the Albany Shoreline. “Caruso is just another developer who’s come along wanting to put an unacceptable development on the shore. We want open space.”

“This is a horrible use of the shoreline,” said Robert Cheasty, former Albany Mayor and the spokesperson for Citizens for Eastshore Parks. “We don’t need an L.A. in the East Bay. One hundred years ago, Oregon managed to protect its shoreline and it’s time the East Bay caught up.”

The Albany Chamber of Commerce has also taken a measured response, raising concerns about the project’s impact on the environment and on the existing business community.

Community involvement

Caruso is politically adroit as well as a master of the development process.

He also knows how to work the levers of electoral politics, and he’s hoping to bring his project to Albany voters, who must approve all waterfront development, early next year with a goal of finishing the development and opening by late 2006 or early 2007.

He waged an expensive electoral campaign to win the approval of voters in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale to build the Americana on Grand in the heart of the downtown.

The measure Glendale voters approved authorized the demolition of 22 buildings to build 475,000 square feet of commercial space, including shops and a 3,500-seat cinema complex. The project also includes rentals and condo units—all offered at market rate—constructed over the retail.

All but two of the buildings have been leveled and Caruso said he expects the final legal challenge to be resolved in the coming weeks.

The Golden Gate Fields project, still unnamed—“we like to have our name come from the community,” he said—is one of a pair of joint ventures by Caruso and Magna Entertainment, the Canadian firm that owns the largest chunk of America’s horse-racing venues.

Magna’s racing empire has been hemorrhaging cash, and the shopping complexes are seen as a way to earn more money out of choice land in urban centers.

The two are also paired on a similar project at the famed Santa Anita track in Los Angeles County, which Caruso said is further along in the development stage.

Caruso has deep pockets and powerful friends to help along the way.

He’s one of the heaviest of political players and a major donor to Republican causes and candidates. A friend of and major contributor to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, he served on the governor’s transition team after the recall election.

On Aug. 5, 2004, he gave Schwarzenegger’s California Recovery Team $25,000, followed on Oct. 12 by $57,221.66 in non-monetary contributions. On March 11 of this year he gave another $22,300 in cash, followed by $100,000 on Aug. 25.

On March 30, he gave $22,300 to the Schwarzenegger’s reelection campaign, the same month he gave $100,000 to the California Republican Party.

He was also a major contributor to George W. Bush, including a June 21, 2004, gift of $100,000 to the Progress for America Voter Fund, which ran television spots for the Bush campaign. At one fundraising dinner held at his house, he managed to raise a cool $1 million for Bush’s reelection campaign—earning him the rank of a “Bush Ranger,” the ranking bestowed on the president’s hottest fund-raisers.

Caruso’s spouse, Tina, is also a major contributor to Republican causes.

Caruso was born into a wealthy family and grew up in Trousdale Estates, perhaps the poshest section of Beverly Hills. His father, Henry, founded Dollar Rent-A-Car and built it into an empire before selling it to the Chrysler Corporation in 1990.

A graduate of the University of Southern California and Pepperdine University’s law school, he became a developer at the age of 27 when the law firm that employed him went bust, according to a profile in the Pasadena Star News.

Bankrolled in part by his father, he launched into a new career as a developer. For his first ventures, he bought land near airports, then leased it back to car rental agencies. And now he builds shopping centers, or “lifestyle centers,” as he described them to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

Unlike the enclosed malls of yore, Caruso’s creations are open-air venues, done in faux period styles, featuring walkways, fountains, stained glass and rococo detail to give them the look and feel of theme parks—where the theme in question is consumption in a conspicuous environment.

His most controversial creation is The Grove, a pleasure plaza writ large directly next to the funkier and more human-scale Los Angeles Farmers’ Market.

Caruso’s projects are popular with city officials and planners, and he’s been sought out by municipalities to create projects to help them raise new tax revenues and restore the luster of fading communities.

Some call it a mall, others, mixed-use retail. Whichever the case, tensions were mounting in Albany as city leaders prepared for the unveiling of the latest development plan for the 102-acre Golden Gate Fields property on the Albany waterfront.

For the past 10 months, Los Angeles-based developer Caruso Affiliated has been promoting the idea of building “high quality” retail development on the parking lot of the racetrack, which was purchased by Magna Entertainment in 1999. A presentation of plans by the Magna-Caruso partnership took place Thursday, but the Albany City Council decided to take action of its own earlier in the week.

The Albany City Council gave their approval to establish an advisory team to explore the idea of developing at Golden Gate Fields. The city will use its own staff and consultants, while Caruso will cover the costs.

“This clearly is the most significant piece of property in the city,” said Beth Pollard, Albany’s city administrator, who presented the council with a highly-anticipated staff report on the Golden Gate Fields property. The report was distributed to the public at the meeting and is available on the city’s website.

City officials stressed the importance of exploring options that would strike a balance between maintaining revenues and open space.

“Ultimately it’s the Albany voters that will determine what uses are allowed,” Pollard said, referring to Measure C.

Passed in 1990 in response to previous development proposals at the waterfront, Measure C forces a city-wide election on any application for a use not authorized by the waterfront zoning district. Commercial retail is currently not an authorized use, therefore Magna-Caruso will have to convince Albany residents if they are to move forward.

With the growing popularity of simulcasting taking race fans out of the grandstand, Magna is seeking new ways to boost sagging revenue and track attendance. Proponents of the retail development plan argue that it would provide a stable source of income for the city as well as business opportunities for entrepreneurs.

While the city still generates close to $900,000 annually from having the track in town, there is concern over how much longer Magna will keep their horses running in Albany. Some point to Magna’s plans to develop a new racetrack in Dixon as a sign they might be pulling out of the Bay area.

Magna representatives say the track isn’t going anywhere.

“We have no plans to end thoroughbred racing at Golden Gate Fields,” said Peter Tunney, vice president with Magna.

But not everyone seemed reassured by their assurances.

“In my experience people are most adamant they’re not going to leave just before they do,” said Albany Mayor Robert Good. “It would be wise for us to prepare.”

Heeding calls for such preparation, earlier this month the city’s waterfront committee asked for the creation of a waterfront master plan to be completed independent of any specific development proposal. Such a plan could cost Albany between $500,000 and $1 million.

That would be money well spent, according to some Albany city leaders who have expressed concerns over the likelihood that the Caruso-funded advisory team, though staffed by city consultants, would favor the developer’s agenda.

Former Albany mayor and current waterfront committee member Robert Cheasty said he was “mildly disappointed” upon hearing that Caruso would fund the advisory team.

“Asking a developer to put up the money may save money, but it puts us at a disadvantage,” said Cheasty. “We don’t have a truly independent process.”

Cheasty and others are solidly against major retail development at the site. Environmentalists and open-space advocates desperately want to protect one of the last underdeveloped spots in the Bay area. For them, the area presents a rare opportunity to preserve waterfront property as parkland.

“They [Caruso] have wonderful ideas for Southern California and I think they should take them back to Southern California,” quipped Cheasty, who is also the president of Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP), an umbrella organization of environmentalists dedicated to preserving open space at the waterfront. CESP is promoting an alternative plan that favors tearing down the track to create more open space. As a compromise, the CESP plan would build a hotel conference center on a smaller portion of land close to the freeway.

On Thursday all eyes were on Caruso as residents and officials awaited the announcement of their development proposal.

“If we don’t see significant park and open space in the presentation, it will have difficulty passing a vote by Measure C,” warned Albany Councilman Allan Maris. “I hope the developer hears that loud and clear.”

The South Berkeley drug wars came to Small Claims Court in Berkeley this week, with opposing witnesses arguing whether an aging Oregon Street homeowner was the knowing matriarch of a drug-dealing family or the elderly victim of abusive children.

In the case, Paul Rauber, et. al v. Lenora Moore, 15 neighbors of Moore, the longtime owner of a home near the corner of Oregon and California streets, are suing the 75-year-old woman in small claims court for damages of $5,000 apiece relating to allegations of drug activity in the vicinity of the home by several of Moore’s children and grandchildren.

In a three-hour hearing, Court Commissioner John Rantzman took testimony from witnesses from both sides, and then adjourned the hearing until Nov. 3 to hear testimony from plaintiffs and the defendant in the case.

While small claims court was traditionally designed for plaintiffs and defendants to present their cases without having to rely on outside counsel, both sides in Rauber v. Moore are relying heavily on outside assistance.

The plaintiff neighbors were assisted in drawing up their legal papers for the case by the Oakland-based nonprofit organization Neighborhood Solutions, while Moore was assisted in court by East Bay Community Law Center’s Leo Stegman, who said he is working with Moore on his own and not in connection with the law center. Stegman, in fact, acted as Moore’s de facto attorney, making her opening statement, arguing motions, and providing rebuttal to the plaintiffs’ witnesses.

Stegman did not contest the contention by five plaintiffs’ witnesses—including two Berkeley police officers—that the South Berkeley neighborhood surrounding Moore’s house is a hotbed of drug activity. Stegman also did not contest the plaintiffs’ contention that restraining orders taken out by Moore last spring—shortly after the filing of the Small Claims lawsuit—have not been effective in keeping Moore’s children and grandchildren away from the house.

In the most emotional testimony, Phyllis Brooks Schaefer, the 70-year-old co-owner of a house near Moore’s, in which her daughter lives, talked about the fear of visiting the area.

“My daughter does not have the use of her house,” Schaefer said, at one point breaking up in tears. “If she wants to enjoy friends, she has to bring them to my condo [in a nearby neighborhood]. Visiting her, I quickly learned the signs of drug dealing, much of it emanating from Moore’s house. There’s constant shouting, hitting, cars coming up constantly and drug deals going on. My daughter can no longer use the front room of the house because the large window facing out on the street makes it too dangerous. When I visit her, I cannot park in certain areas. My daughter was physically attacked in her house by a man who was associated with [Mrs. Moore’s house]. The thought of this fills me with terror. Home owners and renters should not have to live in fear of this kind of violence.”

The two officers—Jim Marangoni and former task force member Mike Durban—testified that several persons arrested for drug dealing near Moore’s house were either children or grandchildren of Moore’s, and that an October, 2004 search warrant raid of Moore’s premises netted the arrest of three of Moore’s offspring for cocaine, heroin, and firearm possession. Durban called Moore’s house “a safe haven; that’s where they actually keep the drugs.”

But Stegman argued that Moore had no control over her adult children, and that she was as much a victim of the drug dealing and violence as the other neighbors.

Wilma Jean Morris, the niece of Moore’s invalid husband, told the court that she was assisting Moore in keeping some of the children away from the house, but it was a difficult job.

“I got things in order there but keeping it in order, I can’t do it all the time,” she said.

“When those children see me coming, they scatter,” she added, clapping her hands together sharply and then waving them apart like a crowd disappearing. “They’re disrespectful to their mother and father. I have put out quite a few of them. I’ve told them they have to come through me. But I can’t be there all the time, and they come back when I’m not there.”

Morris said that the Moore house “is not the only house with drug activity on that street.”

Answering charges by Stegman that the neighbors were only interested in getting Moore to sell her house, one of the plaintiffs, Marion Mabel, said after the hearing that “we don’t want to get rid of Mrs. Moore and her husband. We just don’t want the drug dealing to go on.”

For her part, Moore said outside the courtroom that she would like to see the court commissioner “help to get some of these things settled. I want him to understand that I’m doing my best to take care of this.”l

Yahoo and UC Berkeley on Tuesday debuted the Internet giant’s new Berkeley lab, where students will work alongside Yahoo employees to try to make the search engine more responsive to individual tastes.

The 10,000-square-foot lab at 1950 University Ave. is the third of UC Berkeley’s corporate partnerships to spawn an off-campus research lab in downtown Berkeley. City officials hope Yahoo’s presence in the privately owned building, in offices formerly occupied by the financial firm Barra, will bolster a downtown still beset by empty storefronts.

“Having a world-famous organization set up a research lab in downtown Berkeley is in and of itself important,” said David Fogarty of Berkeley’s Office of Economic Development. He predicted similar partnerships would emerge from a recent city-UC settlement over the university’s expansion plans.

The lab, which opened in August, will focus on making it simpler for web surfers to post pictures, stories, videos and music to the Internet.

“This is about ending the tyranny of the webmaster,” said Marc Davis, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems, who has taken leave to become the founding director of Yahoo Research Labs Berkeley.

Davis said he wanted to add context to the data on the Internet to expand the capabilities of the Yahoo search engine. Rather than just offering information based on priorities determined by a webmaster, Yahoo is working to customize each search for users by analyzing where they are connected on the Internet and what their on-line activity is.

Such information would then be available for self-created community groups on the Yahoo portal, so when members run searches they will receive data most relevant to their interests first.

Yahoo has hired several interns from UC Berkeley to help staff the lab. The company, which is still hiring full-time staff, declined to say how many workers would be stationed in Berkeley or how much money it was investing in the facility. Yahoo also has research labs in Pasadena and at its headquarters in Sunnyvale.

Danah Boyd, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student and lab intern, said the lab’s biggest benefit for students has been getting access to Yahoo’s 176 million registered users.

“Yahoo has obscene amounts of data,” she said. “If you’re an academic you usually get to work with maybe six people who you rope into the project by offering them pizza.”

Student researchers will also analyze user trends to determine how to make the media technology accessible to different types of users.

“This will be the greatest instant feedback machine on the planet,” said Usama Fayyad, Yahoo’s Chief Data Officer.

Yahoo will have first commercial rights to research at the lab, said Dana Bostrom, associate director of UC Berkeley’s Industry Alliances Office. She added that the partnership with Yahoo wouldn’t preclude the university from striking deals with the company’s competitors.

Besides Yahoo, UC Berkeley has partnered with Intel on a computer lab at Center Street and Shattuck Avenue, and with a German nonprofit to form the International Computer Science Institute on Center Street. Bostrom said having an off-campus facility is unusual and that she didn’t know of any similar partnerships under discussion.

The lab is Yahoo’s first partnership with a university, but it won’t be the last, Fayyad said.

“It’s important [for Yahoo] to have new blood coming in and for us to show them that Yahoo is doing deep and interesting research,” he said.

Yahoo’s chief competitor, Google, is well connected to Stanford. The company’s founders attended the school and Stanford President John Hennessy sits on Google’s board of directors.

The Berkeley lab originated from a speaker series earlier this year when Davis addressed Yahoo executives with his vision of the future of Internet searches.

“It resonated so deeply with us that we wouldn’t let him out of the building,” said Yahoo’s Director of Technology Development Bradley Horowitz.

The city will still be able to collect taxes on the property, which is privately owned and rented by Yahoo. University-owned property is off the tax rolls—a major source of city-university tension.

Berkeley Honda’s pre-game tailgate parties outside Memorial Stadium, which two weeks ago drew several union protesters, might soon get a visit from the State Department of Alcohol Beverage Control.

“If the reports are true that they were giving out free beer, that’s a misdemeanor and definitely something we would actively enforce,” said ABC District Administrator Andrew Gomez.

Last week the Daily Planet published a first person account of the party leading up to the Cal-Arizona football game from pro-union demonstrator Zelda Bronstein, who is also a Daily Planet Public Eye columnist. She charged that Berkeley Honda employee Tim Lubeck was “loudly hawking free beer and ... apparently not bothering to card any of the young people who took up his offer.”

Judy Shelton, a frequent picketer outside Berkeley Honda, said she also witnessed employees giving free beer to passing students without carding them at the tailgate party.

Berkeley Honda General Manager Steve Haworth contended that the party, one of many approved by Cal, adjacent to Kleeberger Field, was an adult-only affair.

“I’m not sure what she was looking at,” Haworth said. “There were no young people drinking beer period.”

Haworth said the party, which is posted on the company’s website, was restricted to the friends and families of Berkeley Honda employees and was part of the dealership’s effort to raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims.

The dealership’s website yesterday advertised free shuttle service between the Shattuck Avenue shop and Cal home games, offering to “host a free tailgate party in the north end zone.”

Haworth has close ties to Cal athletics and hosts benefit auctions for the football, baseball and golf teams.

Since buying the dealership this summer, Berkeley Honda owner Tim Beinke, a resident of the Blackhawk subdivision in Danville, has become embroiled in a bitter strike with union mechanics after the dealership dismissed nearly half of the staff and stopped contributing to the union pension funds. Talks with union officials have been sporadic and the two sides remain in a stalemate.

UC Berkeley Police Capt. Mitch Celaya said that after hearing second-hand accounts of Berkeley Honda giving out free beer he asked the athletic department to review campus alcohol rules with the dealership.

“My understanding is that they know not to distribute to the public,” Celaya said.

Campus rules allow for private tailgate parties with alcohol. To distribute alcohol to people not affiliated with the party, the dealership would have had to apply for special permits, according to Celaya.

He added that police had also asked Berkeley Honda to remove dealership banners on trucks used to shuttle tailgaters from Berkeley Honda to the party.

Celaya said the banners made it difficult for officers at the scene two weeks ago to determine whether the event was a private tailgate party or an athletic department sponsored event, in which case the sponsors would have permits to distribute alcohol.

ABC’s Gomez, who learned about the Honda event from the newspaper story, said that state law prohibits tailgaters from giving out beer to people outside their party or anybody under 21.

“If you’re open to the general public, you need ABC permits,” he said.

Although the university would not be liable for any violations, Gomez said ABC would charge the person giving out the alcohol in such a situation. He added that ABC has patrolled the Oakland Coliseum parking lots and Memorial Stadium before football games to cite minors possessing beer.

The diversity of city councilmembers and mayoral appointments to the 34 Berkeley commissions is “abysmal,” according to Councilmember Kriss Worthington, but he expects it to dramatically increase in the near future in part as the result of a recently-released report.

Worthington’s report, issued last Tuesday in the old City Hall in conjunction with National Diversity Day, showed that while councilmembers’ and mayoral appointments of African-Americans is close to their percentage in the population, appointment of Latinos, Asian American/Pacific Islanders, and college students is lagging far behind their numbers in the city.

Worthington called the lack of minority and student commissioners an “error of omission rather than commission. None of the councilmembers are going out and saying, ‘I’m going to keep black people off these commissions.’ But we live in a segregated society, even in a city as varied as Berkeley, and we tend to appoint the people who we see around us. So white people tend to appoint white people without really thinking about it. We all need to be prodded.”

According to the report, which was compiled by student volunteers, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders are the least-represented ethnic minority on city commissions in proportion to their population, with 17.6 percent of the city population, but only 5.2 percent of the appointments.

Latinos (9.5 percent of the population) made up 4.2 percent of the appointments, African-Americans (12.3 percent of the population) made up 10.3 percent of the appointments, and college students (20 to 25 percent of the population) made up 8.1 percent of the appointments.

A category called “whites and other” made up 60.6 percent of Berkeley’s population and 70.3 percent of the commission appointments.

Berkeley’s city councilmembers and mayor appoint two people apiece to the Health Commission and one person apiece to all the other city commissions. The newly-created Downtown Commission was not reflected in Worthington’s report.

The study shows that the initiator of the study, Worthington, had both the highest percentage of minority appointments (69 percent) and college student appointments (50 percent) of any member of council.

Moore also had the second-highest college student appointment percentage at 11 percent, followed by Spring and Olds (6 percent) and Wozniak (4 percent). Maio and Anderson did not have a college student appointment.

According to the report, Mayor Tom Bates appointed 23 percent minorities to commissions and 17 percent college students, while Councilmember Laurie Capitelli did not have a minority or a college student appointment.

Wozniak said that Bates’ appointment of only one African-American was “pretty sad, and pretty surprising. For years, the NAACP used to give [former mayor] Shirley Dean a hard time because she only had one African-American appointment. After that, to her credit, she appointed a number of African-Americans, at least as many as four. But now I see that Bates has the same number of African-American appointments as Dean had.”

Worthington also said he thought that Wozniak’s dearth of student appointments was “one hundred times more negligent than Capitelli’s” because of the larger percentage of college students in Wozniak’s District 8 than in Capitelli’s District 5.

Wozniak was not available for comment, but in a statement to the Daily Cal, he was quoted as saying that “it’s not quite as simple as saying they should represent (more students). Many of the college students in my district are freshmen, and I haven’t detected a lot of interest in city politics.”

Worthington said that because of the attention now being generated, “I expect 10 people of color and 10 students will be appointed in the next couple of months.”?

One of the Bay Area’s most unique theatrical companies has claimed a bridgehead in Berkeley, and they’re marking the event with a four-hour celebration Sunday afternoon.

The Marsh, which has been delighting audiences and introducing hundreds of young people to the full range of theatrical arts, crafts and business savvy for the last 16 years in San Francisco, is the newest commercial tenant in the Gaia Building in downtown Berkeley.

Though Marsh Berkeley has been offering performances of Executive Order 9066, a play examining the internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans during World War II, since Sept. 22, Sunday’s fest marks its official arrival.

The company is the creation of Stephanie Weisman, a native of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who arrived in Berkeley in 1985, moving into an apartment above Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue.

She came with a master’s in creative writing from the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York, where she had been a student and protégé of poet Robert Creeley, edited the Black Mountain II Review and developed and taught a class on small press publishing.

Four years later, she said, “I started The Marsh to make it easy to get my work out.”

The name comes from an interlude when Weisman lived on the edge of a marsh while she wrote, discovering that the environment teeming with life served as a metaphor for her own creative processes.

The company’s first home was a one-night-a-week slot in the performance space of the Hotel Utah at Fourth Street and Bryant in San Francisco that opened in July 1989, she recalled, “and we went from one night to seven nights a week in a month’s time.”

The 1990 season opened in the former Café Beano at 19th and Valencia streets with Haiku Tunnel, a piece by Josh Kornbluth—one of the performers who’ll be on stage Sunday—which, 11 years later, Weisman helped produce as a feature film.

Two moves more moves brought the crew to the not-so-Modern Times Building on Valencia with an opening performance from Merle “Ian Shoales” Kessler, another performer at Sunday’s gala. The final move came in 1992, when the ever-growing The Marsh moved into the jazz club Bajones at 1062 Valencia St., a building they bought four years later.

“When we bought, we only has the 2,500-square-foot theater space. It’s turned into 12,000 on two floors, including a 3,000-square-foot dance studio upstairs,” Weisman said. “We blossomed with each change of venue, and the space has really driven us. I really love that space.”

As the San Francisco space grew, so did the programs to fill it. Monday nights are usually reserved for Monday Night Marsh, offering works-in-progress by a variety of artists, and the Mock Café every Saturday night, featuring stand-up comedy two doors down for at 1074 Valencia St.

But public performances are just the surface. A variety of classes and workshops offer opportunities to hone a variety of theatrical chops, and Weisman’s especially delighted with the youth programs they’ve created.

The Marsh Youth Theater in San Francisco under the direction of Berkeley resident and composer Emily Klion brings together public school youth, from lower-income families, with students from the San Francisco Day School in a program that provides instruction in drama, music, both voice and instrumental, staging, costumes and other theatrical skills that climaxes in a once-a-year major show.

Weisman launched her newest youth program last month, with the aid of grant from the Irvine Foundation.

“We’ve chosen five young artists who, over a nine-month period will be developing performances in workshops,” she said. “The program is on two tracks, the development of a show and the development of the knowledge and technology of producing a show, culminating in a festival with full length shows.”

Some of those shows will come to the Gaia Cultural Center.

The second track features a series of month-long workshops where the young artists delve into fund-raising, marketing, production, promotion, business planning and the computerized end of the business.

“At the end, they’ll know the basics of the business from beginning to end,” Weisman said, adding, “the most successful students we have are the ones who pay a great deal of attention to the business end.”

One faculty member is writer/performer/director/gifted mimic Charlie Varon—another performer at Sunday’s gala—whose works include the nationally acclaimed Rush Limbaugh in Night School.

Weisman says she’ll bring the first children’s program to Berkeley in January. As the programs grow, so do the performances.

“We’ve done an enormous amount on a small budget,” she said. “We did 500 performances last year on slightly more than $500,000. This year, we’ll probably have done 600, and that’s a lot on a budget of a half-million dollars.”

The Marsh landed at the Gaia Building after Weisman told Berkeley composer Ellen Hoffman, who’s collaborating with her on an opera, about her wish to grow.

“She’s friends with Anna DeLeon,” the proprietor of Anna’s Jazz Island, the first performance venue to open in the Gaia Building, which was allowed to exceed downtown height standards in part because developer promised to set aside a floor for cultural uses to qualify for a city “cultural arts space” bonus.

“Ellen said there was space in the Gaia Building,” Weisman recalled, “and I said, ‘Why don’t we make it The Marsh?’”

And because Berkeley’s closer to her Oakland home than The Marsh’s San Francisco facility, it’s a shorter commute to Weisman.

“I’m thrilled to have an East Bay space,” she said.

Sunday’s Gaia Gala, 2-6 p.m., in the Gaia Cultural Center on the first floor of the Gaia Building, 2120 Allston Way, features an hors d’oeuvres and wine reception and performances by Joshua Brody, Brian Copeland, Josh Kornbluth, Jeff Greenwald, Lunatique Fanstastique, Merle “Ian Shoales” Kessler, Rebecca Fisher and Charlie Varon. Tickets are $25 and are available by phone at (800) 838-3006 or through the website:

The scoping session for preparing the environmental impact report on the proposed condominium and retail development at 740 University Ave., originally scheduled for Thursday night, has been rescheduled.

The meeting, called to gather the public’s suggestions for issues to be addressed in the document, has been set for Thursday, Oct. 20 from 4 to 6 p.m. in the second floor conference room of the city Planning Department at 2118 Milvia St.

The project, by Urban Housing Group of San Mateo, calls for 173 housing units built over ground floor commercial and parking space.

The project would require destruction of the buildings housing Brennan’s Irish Restaurant and Celia’s Mexican Restaurant.

The Celia’s building was briefly declared a structure of merit by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, a decision later overturned by the City Council.

Some times the best ideas have unintended consequences. Measure B was a special tax measure that would implement a tax that would be used to primarily reduce class sizes.

“There were hundreds of applicants ... In March, we ended up hiring 50 new teacher s, about 20 for Berkeley High,” said BUSD Public Information Officer Mark Coplan.

While the classes at Berkeley High have been reduced, teachers, as well as students, have been observing something known as the “classroom dash.” In the past, most teacher s have had the liberty to each have a classroom to themselves. Now, with smaller class sizes and approximately 100 additional classes at Berkeley High, some teachers have to share classrooms with other teachers.

“I find it very stressful,” said fourth-ye ar history teacher Alex Angell, who supported Measure B in the last election. “Like students need a break between classes, teachers also need a break. By the time I get to a different classroom, the bell has already rung. I get to make a physical transition, but I don’t get to make a psychological transition. I have no down time.”

Teachers haven’t been the only people stressed out by the lack of organization.

“In my history class, we’re all bunched together in one room,” said sophomore Calvin Young, 14. “Sometimes, my teacher arrives after the tardy bell has rung.”

According to Coplan, the South Campus project, which will likely be completed in a few years, will offer 10 additional classrooms. These classrooms will most likely be used for one of the sm all schools. However, there are no plans in the making for building any additional classroom space.

“I voted for Measure B, because I believe that smaller class sizes are very preferable,” said 10th-grade parent Barbara Besser. “However, my son hasn’t no ticed a considerable difference in his class sizes.”

In November of 2004, 72.2 percent of the voters sided with the BUSD to approve Measure B. It was claimed that over the next two years, the tax revenue would generate $8.3 million. Supporters claimed th at the newly generated tax revenue would reduce the ever-increasing class sizes and argued that we needed more money to fund our children’s education. Opponents charged that the budget mess was a result of fiscal irresponsibility and asserted that Berkele y currently pays the most taxes of any city in the state.

The Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) prides itself on the smaller class sizes. According to School Board Member John Selawsky, the class sizes vary by grade level. Kindergarten through third grade have an average classroom ratio of 20.55 students to each teacher. Fourth, fifth and sixth grades have a classroom ratio of 26 students to each teacher. And seventh grade through twelfth grade have a classroom ratio of 28 students to each teacher.

Some students have been brainstorming solutions to the classroom shortage.

“I don’t think that it was good to knock down classrooms in place of a student lounge in the C Building, like the administration did previously,” said junior Laura Byrne, 16. “Currently, the student lounge is rarely used. That is just another place where teachers could teach and students could learn.”

Rio Bauce will be reporting regularly about Berkeley High School, where he is a student.

I think we should declare a Day of Mourning for West Berkeley for the loss of the arts community at the Drayage Building.

I am deeply saddened we have lost this small community for artists in West Berkeley. It is a great loss for West Berkeley that this has happened.

When did we say that profits were more important than people?

When did we say that artists were no longer important to our community and that we would let the developers and bulldozers destroy a small artist’s community?

When did we say only consumers were important and that people who actually create are not important?

When did we turn a blind eye to the fact that maybe an arts community needed protection from the ravages of the marketplace and developers?

This is a sad day indeed and I hope we are all not naive enough to ignore it, and there should be a Day of Mourning for West Berkeley.

Betsy Strange

Painter in West Berkeley

•

OUTRAGED

Editors, Daily Planet:

I am outraged by some of the stupid letters you publish. I hate you, the writers. That the Daily Planet would even have the gall to print a letter from someone like me! What idiocy! This is a waste of space. Also, the rebuttals to letters like this one are also a waste of space, as are the rebuttals to the rebuttal.

In disgust,

Richard List

•

REDSKINS

Editors, Daily Planet:

I am appalled that Gov. Schwarzenegger had vetoed a bill that would have banned the name “Redskins” in both high school teams and mascots. The governor’s veto has shown how insensitive he is toward American Indians. The word “Redskin” is a very degrading term for them. It makes them less than human beings.

By getting rid of this name, American Indians can have good self-esteem. Gov. Schwarzenegger should be ashamed of himself for vetoing a bill that would have gotten rid of a name that is degrading toward American Indians.

Imagine my surprise when the article had nothing to do with the picture. Imagine my growing irritation as I read.

Wasn’t Matthew Artz out there the day we painted the wall? Didn’t he write an article, with photograph, praising all the community effort that went into the Southside Shines mural? Why didn’t he talk to some of the neighbors before he wrote the one-sided diatribe?

And who is Don Oppenhiem and why did he move here? I probably walk past him every day, unless he’s the guy in the BMW who moved in after Christmas. It seems weird for someone to move into a neighborhood and start hating the corner market.

Especially that one.

A fixture of the neighborhood, Grove Liquor was actually a well-stocked grocery store by ghetto standards with an old-fashioned neighborliness that will be missed. Many of their customers will have a harder time now, having to go farther away. And we’ll all miss the friendly family that was part of our community.

As for the Ashby Arts Community, I ask them to look at their location, at their surrounding ecology if you will ... A cafe? A pool hall? Maybe a boutique? Get real! This mostly residential community isn’t likely to support businesses that don’t supply a need. Of course the playhouses don’t exactly cater to the locals either...

Gentrification? On the southside? That may take awhile. I hope so.

We still miss the convenience and personal touch of our old neighborhood store.

The neighborhood itself sees to be changing, too. More litter on the corner, which used to be swept and cleaned daily ... More yelling and “trash talk” on the street, judging by what I hear from my window .... And of course, no more causal chats with neighbors as we pick up our groceries.

Ah well, times change. We’ll be watching with (vested) interest to see what happens next.

Elizabeth McDonald

•

FREE BEER

Editors, Daily Planet:

Zelda Bronstein’s expose of free beer at the Berkeley homecoming game is only the tip of a huge iceberg. The amount of alcohol consumed and the problem of driving under the influence around home game tailgate parties all over campus would be a scandal if it occurred in any other jurisdiction.

As an employee of the campus grounds department, I have once or twice been required to pick up the tons of tailgate party trash, including empty cases of wine, beer and hard liquor bottles unceremoniously left behind by alumni and boosters who have a funny way of showing their love for UC; drinking and partying and trashing the place, then using the streets and freeways to drive home. And I’m not talking about fraternities.

If the Berkeley citizenry is troubled by the Honda dealership giving away free beer, imagine what they’d think of all the drunk drivers leaving the football games. And if the police are really in search of evil-doers, perhaps they’d stop harassing gutter-punks on Telegraph for a moment and set up checkpoints on University Avenue and do some breath testing.

But that wouldn’t work because so many of those drunk drivers are being hit up for funds to build the new stadium.

Hank Chapot

•

OBJECTIVITY?

Editors, Daily Planet:

Paul Rockwell’s peace movement commentary is really pitiful. Of course, you folks are surrounded by people who glory in oppositional disorder compared to the mainstream views, yet even in Berkeley I have seen times when folks were honest with themselves. Hey, is that cute little shop that sells communist propaganda still open in that little mall area near campus?

Sheehan may be speaking to your sense of “live and let be,” but if one of those “freedom fighters” from al Qaeda ever showed up at your door, I can guarantee you none of you will be given much respect or concern. The peace movement presently is led by folks who revel in socialist/communist thinking, never mind the fact that these ideologies have been shown to fail in a western, capitalist context.

I bet at least you’re gratified I took the time to read your little paper.

John Graham

•

COST OF RFID

Editors, Daily Planet:

On Tuesday, Oct. 18, the City Council will consider the cost of RFID at the Berkeley Public Library. The total cost of Director Griffin’s new RFID system has been estimated, to date, at $2.5 million, and the number is growing.

Anyone concerned with RFID, the fate of Berkeley’s library, or the tax dollars we pay to support it should attend this meeting. Sign-up for public comment begins at 6:30 p.m. The council meets at Old City Hall, Martin Luther King, Jr. Way between Allston Way and Center Street.

Jim Fisher

•

EDUCATION AND CRIME

Editors, Daily Planet:

Gerta Farber writes that if every American of any color or culture was offered free education beyond high school, it would reduce crime. I question what kind of crime it would reduce. It certainly would not lower the now out-of-control white collar crime that is perpetrated in this country; it probably would not alleviate the number of drunk-driving accidents or occurrences of domestic violence. This reasoning that education is always the answer is nonsense. Finland has a very high level of education and the best social healthcare system in the world—providing from birth until death with free university thrown in. That doesn’t stop Finland from having the highest murder rate in Western Europe according to the United Nations. Crime will happen whether it is done by the most illiterate or the most learned, that is the only truth.

John Parman

Baltimore, Maryland

•

FOLLOW THE MONEY?

Editors, Daily Planet:

Neal Rockett’s letter (“Follow the Money,” Oct 11) is indeed “independent of the creed, color, sexual preference, race or ethnicity of all participants” but he quite obviously believes that class is a fair dividing factor. Mr. Rockett claims to be confused as to why the three children born to a mother who has a social worker deserve adequate health care. He cites that the mother does not have custody of her three other children and that the father is apparently not present. The health care needs of infants are not dictated by their mother’s financial standing or marital status.

I understand that the healthcare industry is far from ideal, but at any rate, these “hundreds of thousands of public dollars” are, in my mind, better spent on post-natal care for three children than almost anything else in the world.

Maybe Mr. Rockett could address something that is a source of confusion for me. He quotes Deep Throat, urging people to “follow the money.” What in the world does Watergate have to do with three infants born in a BART station?

Matthew Mitschang

•

BERKELEY HONDA

Editors, Daily Planet:

It has happened once too often in Berkeley that a trusted Berkeley business has sold out to an out-of-town buyer who forces out the old workforce and replaces it with cheaper replacement workers. While the latest instance is that of Berkeley Honda, I can recall at least one other case from a few years ago, that of Spenger’s Fish Grotto, bought by a Northwest firm that replaced most of its loyal workers. (I no longer dine there).

But, much worse than any other such anti-labor actions, Berkeley Honda has insulted the community by trying to capitalize on the good name of Jim Doten. The Spenger’s Restaurant buyers, to my recollection, did not claim that their employees and company were partners with Cal, nor that their food and service was equal to or surpassed that of their famous predecessor. Tim Bienke and Steve Hayworth would have us believe that they are kind charitable people who are being victimized by the strikers and their supporters. Those people are only interested in taking their profits out of Berkeley and back to Blackhawk, where they reside away from public scrutiny.

Business in Berkeley doesn’t have to be non union to be successful, and usually isn’t. We can be proud of our stores, like Andronicos, Peets, Cody’s, for example, or even chain stores like Ross, Walgreens and Longs, that offer goods and services at reasonable prices. We can be proud of the many family owned stores and restaurants that make Berkeley a special place every day of the year. Finally, Berkeley is home to many worker owned collectives that cater to almost every need.

I cannot drive and will never own a Honda or any other car. But, I support the striking workers there because many of them, like me, live in Berkeley and are part of the community. They, like me, would like to continue working here. Certainly, people who live and work in the same city, like me, spend most of their income here. That’s what community is all about.

Boycott Berkeley Honda!

Edith Monk Hallberg

Labor Commission Member

•

DELLUMS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Ron Dellums decides on a whim to run for mayor of Oakland, it seems the minute he stepped up to the podium. . He also decided on a whim to quit his Congressional post midterm in 1998 thus costing the taxpayers of Alameda County close to a million dollars in a slew of special elections. Money much needed in an always cash strapped county. This not the kind of person I want running my city. In short order when he realizes there’s no glory or glamour and loss of family time, he’ll want to move on leaving the citizens in the lurch possibly with a big special election bill. He rarely made public appearances locally while Congressman. He’s lived in D.C. since deserting his office. Is he going to be the absentee mayor, continuing to lobby in Washington while mayor ? Lest you think I’m a Republican or something, I voted for the guy in every office he’s held from city council to congress . However, I will never vote for him again I lost my respect for him in 1998.

Judi Sierra

Oakland

•

DRUG HOUSE

Editors, Daily Planet:

I am the lead plaintiff in the small claims suit against Lenora Moore repeatedly referenced in your Oct. 11 article, “Residents Look to Neighborhood Solutions for Help.” You quoted three supporters of Ms. Moore, but couldn’t find the time to contact any of the 15 Berkeley citizens suing her for allowing her home at 1610 Oregon St. to serve as South Berkeley’s one-stop drug mart. I hope that you will give me the opportunity to respond to them now.

Osha Neumann seems to think the problem is solved because of the multiple restraining orders Moore sought against six members of her own family well after our suit was filed. Some restraint! One was arrested with her pocket full of crack just around the corner on Sept. 27. When another was busted for DUI right in front of Moore’s house on Aug. 4, Moore told the arresting officer, according to the police report, that she didn’t want him arrested for violating the restraining order “because the only reason she had the restraining order is because ‘the neighbors don’t like him.’” A third supposedly restrained family member nevertheless spent last Sunday afternoon hanging out in front of Moore’s house, conversing with Moore’s husband and other family members. In addition, a 15-year-old still living at the house, not subject to a restraining order, is already taking up the family drug trade at the corner of Oregon and California. Other individuals with free access to Moore’s house are also actively dealing at and around the house. Obviously Moore’s restraining orders are no solution to the problem.

Next, one Leo Stegman is quoted as claiming—based on zero evidence—that my aim, and that of my neighbors, is gentrification, “trying to change the make-up of the neighborhood.” As both Stegman and the Daily Planet’s editors are aware, that charge has a clear imputation of racism, which I and my co-plaintiffs, both black and white, flatly reject. Personally, I’m just trying to get rid of the junkies and crackheads, white and black, who throw their used needles into my backyard for my 2-year-old daughter to pick up. I suppose that might be “trying to change the make-up of the neighborhood,” but the Moores get plenty of white frat-boy customers, so is it still gentrification?

Finally, Andrea Pritchard defends the Moores because they are “Berkeley people.” Well, I’ve lived in Berkeley since 1974—is that long enough for me to be a Berkeley person too? An African-American plaintiff in our case has lived on California Street since 1961—can she be a Berkeley person? She was a plaintiff in the previous small claims suit against the Moores in 1992, the one that ended with a firebomb being thrown at the house of the lead plaintiff. That family had to move out of Berkeley, so I guess they aren’t Berkeley people any more.

Reminder to the Daily Planet: Most stories have more than one side, and skin color is an indication of neither virtue nor sin. The assumption that it is what we commonly call racism.

Paul Rauber

•

TO RE-BUILD A BOX

Editors, Daily Planet:

I’m sitting here at a meeting in Berkeley’s world-famous People’s Park. The acting mayor of Berkeley is here, sitting in a circle with approximately 20 other folks.

Already the meeting is boring me. It’s about re-building the free-clothing box, a long-term People’s Park tradition until almost a year ago, when somebody burned it. And then somebody burned the new free-clothing box, which folks built to replace the old one.

Already this meeting is boring me. Already we talked about several ideas such as: contacting “the media” regarding this issue; requesting or demanding that the University of California administrator meet with us regarding this issue; “the destruction of useable clothing”’; building a “coalition”—to include students and nearby residents—around this issue, etc.

Already this meeting is boring me, and I’m trying to reckon: What can I do to make an impact?

How about this: Just today, I, personally, got a nice pair of shoes and a nice T-shirt from the temporary free-clothing box which we just today set up. Plus two of the first few speakers at this meeting, “People’s Park regulars”—perhaps homeless or houseless—said that they got all the clothing they were wearing from the free box.

In fact some folks already—approximately two weeks ago—started rebuilding the free-clothing box. And guess what? Evidently, under cover of darkness, some university security people removed the work which had been done to rebuild the free-clothing box.

So it looks like a clear case of good guys against bad guys. The bad guys are the university administrators who evidently ordered the partially re-built free-clothing box removed approximately two weeks ago, and the good guys are us: those of use who want to rebuild the free-clothing box.

For centuries, Judaism, Christianity, Islam—worshipping the same desert God—these brother religions have been divided from one another, divided even among themselves. It is not news that ancient hatreds persist.

But consider also this: This week, the p resident of the United States, in the spirit of a theocratic Middle Eastern country, and in violation of Article 6 of the Constitution, proposed that his nominee, Harriet Miers, deserves her place on the Supreme Court because of her (evangelical) Christia n faith.

Or consider this: At a press conference last March in Israel, a Muslim cleric, the Orthodox archbishop, the Latin Patriarch, the chief Sephardic rabbi, and the Chief Ashkenazi rabbi, sat side by side to announce their opposition to a gay parade in Jerusalem.

Even as lethal differences separate the three desert religions, this is a time also of strange similarities and new alliances—two against one, or three against the secular state.

Even while some mainline Protestant churches consider div estment from companies that profit from Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories, low-church Protestants become Zionists. For some, support of Israel fulfills an apocalyptic expectation. But such a mainstay of Israeli tourism have evangelicals beco me, a grateful Sharon government may lease to a Colorado Protestant group the site on the Galilee where Christ dispensed the beatitudes.

Sometimes reconciliation masks rivalry. For example, to counter the appeal of Islam in the Third World, Roman Cathol icism accentuates its own conservatism. During the papacy of John Paul II, the Vatican allied itself with Muslim clerics in taking pro-life positions at international meetings, such as at the Cairo Conference on Women in 1994.

So strange, so unprecedented is our religious age of rivalries and alliances, we lack a proper lexicon.

We speak of “fundamentalist Christianity” when we describe the new super-churches in America’s suburbs. But a church like Lakewood in Houston, the largest super-church in the country, is exactly the opposite of fundamentalist—it has exchanged any theological precision for an everyone-is-welcome, feel-good Christianity. In a church like Lakewood there is no distinction between Methodist or Presbyterian.

In another century, wa rs were fought among Christians over intricate points of theology. Now there is reunion, in resistance perhaps to Islam or to secularism. Increasingly, one hears in America people name themselves simply as “Christians.”

Outside Terri Schiavo’s Florida h ospice last year gathered Roman Catholics alongside low-church Protestants. In another time, highly communal Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism’s stress on Christ’s personal call were as different as the “We” and the “I.” In another time in America, the Catholic Church was the “whore of Babylon” in the eyes of many low-church Protestants. Nowadays the tele-evangelist sits beside the Cardinal at the White House prayer breakfast.

From Vienna, Cardinal Schonborn, a confidant of Pope Benedict, voices skepticism about Darwinism. Catholicism long ago rejected a literalist reading of Genesis. But now, as right-wing Protestants challenge evolution in the classroom, and born-again President George Bush proposes teaching the theory of “intelligent design” alongside Darwin, the Viennese cardinal suggests that evolution is mere “ideology, not science.”

In the Middle East, fatal differences between Shia and the Sunni may end up destroying Iraq. In America, a fear of Islam leads many non-Muslims to see Islam as the monolith next door. We speak of “Muslims” without qualification. In time, perhaps America and Europe will create a new Islamic identity in the refusal to distinguish among the several.

Though in a recent poll, a majority of Americans indicated a n “admiration” of Islam. One senses more: one senses envy, envy of the Muslim’s freedom to worship in the public square in ancient, desert cities.

From the U.S. Air Force Academy comes news that coaches and administrators and students—the very people re sponsible for protecting our freedom to believe or not—have busily been proclaiming America “a Christian nation.”

As it has become fashionable for Americans to speak of their religious faith publicly, I confess mine to you: I go to Roman Catholic mass e very Sunday. Yes, I am, you could say, a Christian.

But, ever since Sept. 11, 2001, when havoc descended, in the name of my desert God, I find my easiest companionship with the agnostic and the atheist.

Richard Rodriguez, an essayist and author of, most recently, “Brown: The Last Discovery of America” (Viking, 2003), is working on a book about religion. An earlier version of this essay was aired on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

If you have ever played a competitive sport, you understand that there are actually two sets of rules. In regular games, there are formal rules and, usually, referees to ensure that all players abide by them; the competition is governed by an ethic: “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

In irregular contests, pick-up games, there are informal rules—in some venues called “jungle” rules—and no referees; in this situation, the game is often reduced to doing whatever it takes to win. The contrast between the two is the difference between boxing, conducted by the Marques of Queensbury rules where fighters may only strike the head and upper body with their gloved hands, and extreme fighting, where anything goes.

When we question the actions of the Bush administration, it’s useful to keep this distinction in mind, as George Bush and company talk as if they abide by the political version of the Marques of Queensbury rules but actually play by jungle ethics where anything goes—Bush rules.

Two recent news stories graphically illustrate the nature of Bush rules. It’s been well documented that the administration was indifferent to the tragedy wrought by Hurricane Katrina, until there was an enormous public outcry. What hasn’t been talked about is the contrast between this occasion and their response to Hurricane Frances in September of 2004. Two months before the presidential election, Frances was threatening Florida, with its 27 electoral votes, and the Bush administration leaped into action. The National Guard was mobilized and a federal-state-nonprofit task force was launched—before Frances hit.

Bush rules dictated that the administration had to perform well in this time of crisis, because it represented a political opportunity. Katrina didn’t command the same urgency as it didn’t occur in an election year—Bush was making speeches in California on the day the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast.

Bush rules have also governed the White House response to the outcry over the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The president told the press that he wanted “to get to the bottom” of the leak scandal; his press secretary, Scott McClellan commented, “The president has set … the highest of standards for people in his administration…If anyone in this administration was involved in [the leak], they would no longer be in this administration.” Since those comments, we learned that top administration officials—including key presidential adviser, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff, Scooter Libby—were involved. Yet, no one was punished by the White House. Moreover, according to a July 24 New York Times story and comments made by political commentator, George Stephanopolous on Oct. 2, the president and vice-president were deeply involved in the discussions about Valerie Plame, before her identity was revealed by conservative columnist Bob Novak.

(Federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, questioned Bush for 70 minutes on June 24, 2004; at the time, legal observers remarked on how unusual this was and opined that it indicated a suspicion that the Plame leak occurred at a high level in the administration.)

The hypocrisy of Bush rules might be dismissed as political business-as-usual if it were Richard Nixon who was president; “Tricky Dick” was known to be a slippery character, more interested in political gain than in the common good. However, George W. Bush has made a huge issue of his personal integrity. When he was first nominated to run for president, he made it a point to distinguish his morality from that of Bill Clinton and, by implication, Al Gore.

“Behind every goal I’ve talked about tonight is a great hope for our country … we must usher in an era of responsibility. And our nation’s leaders are responsible to confront problems, not pass them onto others. And to lead this nation to a responsibility era, that president himself must be responsible. So when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.”

Bush promised to bring honor and responsibility to the presidency. Moreover, he claimed to be a Christian; not a superficial believer like Clinton, but a “born again” Christian. His profession of faith bolstered his declaration of integrity.

Americans know a lot about Christianity as more than 80 percent identify with that religion. We understand that orthodox Christians do not lie, put their personal fortune above the common good, or believe that the ends justify the means. Proper Christians operate by the ethical equivalent of the Marques of Queensbury rules. Most believe that it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.

But George W. Bush plays by his own rules. As Americans watch this administration unravel—as the electorate begins to understand the folly of the Iraq occupation, the fantasy of homeland security, and the abandonment of governance in the pursuit of political gain—one wonders which realization will come first: Will it be that Bush the President is incapable of leading the United States, or will it be that Bush the man doesn’t deserve to be called a Christian?

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer and activist. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net. This article also appears in the Huffington Post.

The flight to Ben Gurion Airport from Amman takes only 20 minutes. We arrive in Tel Aviv on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Airport security is heightened. I strategically position myself behind an official from the U.S. State Depa rtment at the passport control. He’s wearing shorts and has been on R&R in Amman.

“They always harass me at Ben Gurion airport,” I tell the big-shot with the diplomatic passport. He goes through fast. “Next,” the female official yells.

“You’re born in Israel, no?” she asks.

“Jerusalem,” I answer, “not Israel. This is what I wrote on the form ... It is also on my passport.”

She rolls her eyes. “You must write a country.” She crosses out Jerusalem and writes “ISRAEL” in red. As usual, I am irritated.

“When I was born,” I say, “the Jordanians controlled Jerusalem. My mother was born there when the British controlled it, and my father was also born in Jerusalem at the start of WWI during the final days of the Ottomans. His passport says Palestine on it, in Arabic, Hebrew and English.”

“Next,” she yells again, handing me my passport and a “security-risk” paper. I am stopped at baggage claim by an Israeli security officer. I look behind him, and there is the State Department guy in his shorts. “Is there a problem?” he asks. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” I reply, “for a Palestinian returning home.”

The Israeli security officer looks at the U.S. official, looks at me, and hands me my passport.

“Welcome to Israel,” he says.

Day Two: Jerusalem

Today is Rosh Hashanah and the first day of Ramadan. No traffic is permitted in the Haradym (orthodox Jewish) neighborhoods in Western Jerusalem, and the Old City comes to a standstill 15 minutes before the Iftar (breaking the fast). Everyone is waiting a nxiously in their dining rooms. There is a strange sense of peace in a place that witnessed so much bloodshed for centuries. I sit on my balcony facing the Mount of Olives, listening to the wind. The calls of the Mu’athens echo in harmony from the seven hills of the city like a symphony... “Allah wa Akbar...Allah wa Akbar,” God is great...God is great. The canon sounds, shattering the peace and signaling the end of the fast. I hear the noise of spoons hitting pots and plates. People talking and laughing. I wonder what it is like to live in the Western part of the city.

Day Three: Ramallah

“Wein Ala Ramallah,” (We are going to Ramallah) a folkloric song everyone from Ramallah knows by heart, highlights the beauty and the longing of what used to be a be autiful village. Now, most of Ramallah’s original inhabitants live in Michigan. My parents used to take us to this place in the summer time to escape the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem. The trip took 15 minutes but felt as if we were going to some faraway place. Today, it took me a little shy of two hours to get there. We went through one bypass road and three checkpoints. Kalandia was the worst. A backlog of hundreds of cars. You can buy just about anything while stuck in traffic: clothes, fake Nikes, fr uits, vegetables, birds, refrigerators. I saw someone selling refrigerators from the back of his truck. Under the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority, Ramallah developed into a mish-mash of buildings without planning or zoning restrictions. Overcrowded, dirty and noisy. Oh, to the glorious days of Ramallah... “Wein ala Ramallah.”

Day Four: Beit Agron

I went to Beit Agron to renew my Israeli press card. Without it I will not be able to cross into Gaza, which is still considered a closed military zon e. At 8:30 a.m., two foreign journalists (one Italian, one British) received their press cards in less than 15 minutes. I, on the other hand, am told that my application will take several days. I plead with the press office employee and tell him that I am staying in the country for only two more days. He does not budge.

I am boiling from the inside out but decide not to lose my temper. So I leave for a stroll in the Old City.

I enter it from the New Gate passing College des Freres, the French Catholic school where I spent 13 years receiving my early education. I walk down the Via De La Rosa, the road taken by Jesus Christ to his Crucifixion, and stop at the sixth station where he fell carrying the cross. I touch the markings on the stone wall ... I no longer feel the pain ... I am not angry any more.

Day Five: Jericho

During the Six Days War in 1967, we stayed at my grandmother’s in Jericho. I always thought of my grandmother as my protector. She was 88 when the Israelis in their tanks rolled down the Mount of Temptations into Jericho. When the soldiers came to our home she made us all stand behind her and made sure we were all safe. Jericho always reminded me of her: warm, old and beautiful ... an oasis.

Today, the ancient road between Jerusale m and Jericho is blocked off by the 30-foot Israeli security wall. The Palestinians call it the “Apartheid Wall.” Now you have to go through a tunnel to link to the one lane highway which snaked its way into Jericho. I know when my ears pop that I am gett ing close to Jericho. It is below sea level.

Today, when we approach Wadi el Qilt intersection, the traffic comes to a quick halt. Two Israeli humvees have blocked off the road and the soldiers are checking Palestinian drivers’ IDs. Of course, Israeli s ettlers with yellow plates are quickly waved through. Palestinians have to sit in their cars for miles under the heat of the sweltering sun of the Jordan Valley.

I see an old lady in her 80s riding on a donkey. She’s carrying grapes and figs. She is sto pped by the Israelis and turned back. She passes our car.

“Where are you heading to, hajeh?” (a title of respect to address the elderly that literally means “pilgrim”)

“Jericho,” she replies. “I’ll get there, Inshallah, don’t worry.”

She gently nudges her donkey, who immediately turns right into the hills. I watch her slowly disappear and reappear like a mirage. It takes us about two hours to make it into the center of town, yet I am thrilled. Jericho has not changed a bit. It remains the same laid-back town I remembered. Farmers still grow citrus and bananas and the center of the town has not grown by a single foot. When we got to the “Douwar” (the Circle), I look to my right and there she is ... and there is her donkey eating some orange peels. He looks happy. We drive next to her and stop. She looks at me and smiles. I smile and wave. I think of my grandmother.

Day Six: Jerusalem

I read in the letters to the editor section of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the Israeli Cabinet has halted t he efforts of the agriculture minister to bypass the High Court’s ruling to end the cruel force-feeding of geese to produce foie gras! This outcome was hailed to “preserve the dignity of Israel as a humanitarian state in keeping with the rule of law.” The letter-writer added: “Perhaps the dignity of Israel as a humanitarian state in keeping with the rule of law will now manifest itself with regard to Palestinians as well as to geese?”

I’ve just finished reading seven newspapers, front to back. Three Isr aeli papers, three Palestinian ones and the International Herald Tribune. The Palestinians are missing one huge newspaper sheltered from partisan and government influence. They need their own New York Times. There is much debate going on in the Israeli pr ess about the future of Israel. Should Israel give up the West Bank? Should Israel sacrifice its Jewish identity for democracy?

There is a lot of talk and debate but no action on the ground to ease the suffering of the Palestinians. The gigantic Wall is almost 70 percent complete, the Israelis continue their policy of demolishing Palestinian homes, illegal settlement activities continue in the West Bank and human rights abuses against the indigenous people of the land are committed daily by the Israeli government, under the watchful eye of the United States and the European Union.

Tonight, I’ll head back to Ben Gurion Airport. A young Israeli security officer, perhaps a new immigrant or the son of one, will ask: “Where is your Israeli ID card? Why did you come back? Who did you see? Who do you know? What do you do?”

For the past six months the United States and the European Union have led a full-court press to haul Iran before the U.N. Security Council for violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) by supposedly concealing a nuclear weapons program. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to declare Iran in “non-compliance” with the treaty, but deferred a decision on referral to the Security Council until Nov. 25.

On S ept. 30, more than a million Indian airport and banking workers took to the streets to denounce the ruling Congress Party as “shameful” for going along with the Sept. 24 “non-compliance” vote in the IAEA. The strikers were lead by four Left parties that are crucial allies of the Congress-dominated United Progressive Alliance government.

Why was India lining up with the United States and the European Union against Iran, and alienating essential domestic allies? Why would India jeopardize a deal with Iran over a $22 billion natural gas deal, and a $5 billion oil pipeline?

To sort this out one has to go back to early this year when CIA Director Porter Goss and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified before Congress that China posed a strategic threat to U.S. interests. Both men lobbied for a “containment” policy aimed at surrounding and isolating China.

One key piece on this new Cold War chessboard is India. But there was an obstacle to bringing India into the ring of U.S. allies stretching from Japan to Tajikistan.

In 1974, using enriched uranium secretly gleaned from a Canadian and U.S. supplied civilian reactor, India set off an atomic bomb. New Delhi was subsequently cut off from international uranium supplies and had to fall back on its own rather thin domestic sources.

But the Bush administration realized that if it wanted India to play spear bearer for the United States, the Indians would need to expand and modernize their nuclear weapons program, an almost impossible task if they co uldn’t purchase uranium supplies abroad. India produces about 300 tons of uranium a year, but the bulk of that goes to civilian power plants.

According to the 2005 edition of “Deadly Arsenals,” India presently has between 70 and 110 nuclear weapons.

T hose weapons, however, are fairly unsophisticated, and clunky for long-range missiles. Nor are Indian missiles yet capable of reaching targets all over China, although the Agni III, with a range of 2,000, miles is getting close.

So here comes the sleight of hand.

On June 28, Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee met with Rumsfeld to sign the U.S.-India Defense Relationship Agreement, which gives India access to sophisticated missile technology under the guise of aiding its space program.

The June a greement was followed by a July 18 meeting of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush that ended U.S. restrictions on India’s civilian nuclear power program, and allowed India to begin purchasing uranium on the international mark et.

By allowing Indian to buy uranium on the open market, the pact will let India divert all of its domestic uranium supplies to weapons production. That would allow it to produce up to 1,000 warheads, making it the third largest arsenal in the world beh ind the United States and Russia.

Of course there was a price for these agreements: India had to vote to drag Iran before the Security Council. The Americans were quite clear that failure to join in on the White House’s jihad against Teheran meant the ag reements would go on ice.

“India,” warned U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Ca), will “pay a very hefty price for their total disregard of U.S. concerns vis-à-vis Iran.”

So that explains the vote. But is the Congress Party really willing to hazard its majority i n the Parliament and endanger energy supplies for the dubious reward of joining the Bush administration’s campaign to isolate Iran and corner the dragon? Well, a “sleight of hand” can work both ways.

Right after the Sept. 24 vote in the IAEA, Iranian Pre sident Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad gave an incendiary interview to the United Arab Emirates based newspaper, the Khaleej Times, threatening retribution against any country that voted against Iran. A few days later, the Iranians reversed themselves, claiming that their president had never actually talked with the Khaleej Times. And the Indians quickly announced that the gas and pipeline deal was still on. It’s a good bet that the Indians give Teheran a wink and a nod following their “yes” vote. India is already hinting that it may change its vote come Nov. 25 (one suspects from “yes” to “abstain”).

The Sept. 24 vote was 22 “yes,” one “no,” and 12 abstentions. China and Russia abstained but have publicly said that they are opposed to sending Iran to the Security Council. Two of the “yes” votes are rotating off the 35-member IAEA board to be replaced by Cuba and Belarus. And much to the annoyance of the United States, Britain, France and Germany met this past week to discuss restarting direct talks with Teheran. In short, it is unlikely that Iran will end up being referred to the Security Council.

Will an “abstain” vote by India be enough to open the gates for U.S. technology to ramp up New Delhi’s nuclear weapons programs? Probably.

Does this mean India joins the U.S. alliance against China? The answer to that question is a good deal more complex.

In April of this year India and China signed a “Strategic and Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Prosperity,” and trade between the two up and coming Asian giant s is projected to reach $20 billion by 2008.

In fact, in the end the United States may just end up getting snookered. As analyst Lora Saalman writes in Japan Focus, “The technical and military hardware provided by the United States promises to expand In dia’s political, strategic and military foot print even beyond China,” but that rather than pitting the two huge Asian powers against one another, “the United States may be setting up India to instead serve as a future strategic counterweight to U.S. inte rests in Asia and abroad.”

• • •

“Spiraling out of control” is how Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger described the U.S. military’s conduct toward journalists in Iraq.

At least 66 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, four of them from Reuters. Besides the killings, scores of journalists have been arrested and detained.

Reuters is particularly upset with the detention of cameraman Samir Mohammed Noor, who was arrested last April and taken before a secret tribunal. The tribunal found him to be “an imperative threat to the coalition forces and the security of Iraq” and ordered him to be detained indefinitely. Reuters is demanding he be released and given an opportunity to defend himself in open court.

In a letter to Senator John Warner (R-Va), chair of the Armed Services Committee, the Reuters head charged that “By limiting the ability of the media to fully and independently cover the events in Iraq, the U.S. forces are unduly preventing U.S. citizens from receiving information … undermining the very freedoms the U.S. says it is seeking to foster every day that it commits U.S. lives and U.S. dollars.”

In the slaverytime plantation quarters, where the black field hands used to live, they often amused themselves in the evenings after work with jokes and songs and stories. On some plantations, the slavemasters and their childr en would often walk over from the Big House to watch these impromptu “nigger shows” (to use the popular term of the day), and they would sometimes bring along visitors as well to see the entertainment.

Eventually, a handful of white folks began to compil e these jokes and songs and stories and disseminate them to a wider audience. Between 1881 and 1905, for example, Georgia writer Joel Chandler Harris published several collections of tales by a fictional black man he called Uncle Remus, which have come do wn to us as the now-famous “Bre’r” Rabbit stories.

Much earlier than that, even while slavery was still in existence, other white folks organized these slavequarters shows into elaborate staged follies called minstrel shows, where white performers with nappy wigs and faces blacked-out with cork would strum banjos, buck-dance, and sing the old nigger songs. The tune “Dixie,” for example was supposed to have been created on a banjo—a five-string African instrument brought to America by African captives—by Ohio-born Dan Emmett while working in a minstrel show in the 1850s. Mr. Emmett, who was white, later toured the country in blackface, performing under the billing of “The Renowed Ethiopian Minstrel.”

These minstrel shows were wildly popular, America’s fi rst form of popular mass entertainment, revered by such observers as Mark Twain. They carried on into the 20th century, and it’s no accident that one of the first talking motion pictures—The Jazz Singer—featured Al Jolson on his knees singing “Mammy” in b lackface. Jolson had already achieved fame as a performer doing the same thing on the vaudeville stage.

Of course, the creators of these jokes and songs—the African captives on the slaverytime plantations—themselves never reaped any benefit from the doll ars and fame that flowed into the world of minstrel productions. In fact, we don’t even know their names.

Times passed and slavery ended, but much of the relationship between the African-American entertainment creators and the entertainment industry itse lf remained the same. The old buck-and-wing “coon songs” gradually morphed into what became known as the “blues,” slow-paced at first, but eventually going uptempo and evolving in the late 1940s and 1950s into what became known as “rhythm and blues,” or R &B. The originators and performers of blues and R&B were black entertainers, and many of them—such as Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey—were huge draws in live road shows in black communities along what was called the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” which ran from black-venu e theaters such as the Apollo in New York and the Howard in D.C. down through Virginia, the Carolinas, and into the lower South as far as Texas. (The Chitlin’ Circuit was recently popularized in the Jamie Foxx movie, Ray.) Some of these black blues and R& B artists even signed deals with record companies and recorded songs.

These black blues and R&B songs were called “race records” in their day. Anyone, white or black, could go into a store and buy them, but they were marketed almost exclusively to the bl ack market. In the days of segregation, “race records” were almost never played on white radio stations. But record companies, seeing as much potential popularity in the larger white community for the blues and R&B forms as there had earlier been for mins trel, signed up white artists to re-record these blues and R&B songs in a practice that was called “covering.” These white-artists-singing-black-songs were then marketed to white audiences, most of whom almost never got the chance to hear the original bla ck versions. And while many of the original black artists were broke and hungry, barely making ends meet, some of those white artists became some of the most famous entertainers of our lifetime. Elvis Presley—who came to fame singing a watered-down versio n of Big Mama Thornton’s risqué “Hound Dog”—was one such artist. Another was Pat Boone, who made a living covering such Little Richard hits as “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti.”

Little Richard has lived long enough to see the end of segregation and th e opening up of his talents to white audiences, but he remains bitter about those years in which so many black artists worked in obscurity to create the art forms for which they didn’t gain fame or fortune, while white entertainers and producers dipped in, picked up black culture on the cheap, and marketed it in the white community for millions.

To their credit, many of those white artists who sampled black culture turned around and gave credit to the originators. Berkeley native Johnny Otis, Greek by bi rth, passed over the racial curtain the opposite way, effectively living as a black man while writing and performing black hits (he was Big Mama Thornton’s producer, and was a co-writer of the original lyrics to “Hound Dog”). The Beatles, many of whose ea rly songs were remakes of Chuck Berry hits or other black blues and R&B standards, went out of their way to acknowledge that cultural debt. So, too, did Eric Clapton, who often pays tribute to the black blues geniuses upon whose shoulders he stands. Black blues and R&B giants like B.B. King and Ray Charles eventually became nationally famous entertainers, recognized for their genius.

Many black entertainers are still exploited, of course. But with the crossover success of the Motown sound in the 1960s—wh en white kids could first openly listen en masse to black songs by black artists on the radio—down to the present rap/hip hop era, where black artists are able to take their creativity directly to all the people, the era is over in America when other races are able to step in and take over an entertainment form created by blacks because blacks are not allowed to practice that entertainment form in public.

Or is it?

Well, friends, we saw this one coming. Let’s talk (again) about the sideshows.

From the time that the Oakland police and a handful of Oakland politicians drove the sideshows out of the parking lots at Eastmont Mall and Pac’n Save on Hegenberger and into the East Oakland streets, many of the original black organizers of those events have been trying to work with the City of Oakland to try to set up legalized sideshows. Their argument has been that such legalized sideshows would provide entertainment outlets for black Oakland youth, help develop responsible young black entrepreneurs, and bring in much-needed tax dollars to the city.

But with the notable exception of City Councilmember Desley Brooks, the City of Oakland has not worked back.

The Oakland Police Department and most city officials have been lukewarm to the idea, and Mayor Jerry B rown and City Councilmember Larry Reid have been downright hostile. Reid, in fact, has said that he will “never” allow a legalized sideshow in Oakland.

But a legalized sideshow was held in Alameda County last weekend—in full view of police and politician s—and black people weren’t invited.

If you want to hear what happened, you’ll have to read next week’s column.an

Who in their right mind would ever think to create a sports field on the shoulder of an interstate freeway that is often in gridlock and whose daily auto capacity exceeds 250,000 vehicles? It seems no one, except the City of Berkeley, which is now proposing the Gilman Street “Freeway Fields.” As it turns out, the site designated for this recreational facility is connected to the East Shore Regional Park. Unfortunately, it is that narrow portion that is directly adjacent to I-80, separated from the busy highway by only the frontage road and a chain link fence.

The city, which is both the project developer and the permit regulator, has dismissed the site’s undeniably bad air quality. Planners have been less than honest about the potential health impacts to the Freeway Field users, the majority of whom are children. The Gilman Freeway Fields, like a number of other West Berkeley projects, has created serious conflicts over air quality and land use. The Gilman Street project is the most extreme example. Berkeley’s proposal to build five sports fields at this site throws all caution to the wind in the hope that the wind will literally blow the right way.

Upwind and Downwind

Anyone who has visited the proposed site knows that during every season of the year, there are days, and even periods of each day, when there is no wind or when it blows west, towards the bay. So, it may come as a surprise that the city’s project consultants have argued that the Freeway Fields would be upwind from auto and industry emissions when the fields are in use.

Although the city’s consultants acknowledge there are days when the fields would have no wind, or would be downwind, from freeway and industry pollution, the health risks were assessed as if the proposed fields were only impacted by bay winds. This conveniently avoids any discussion of the health consequences for those children on site during the times when freeway and industry emissions do impact the proposed location. What annual percentage of days with emissions permeating the fields is acceptable from a public health perspective? Ten percent? Twenty percent? Thirty percent? More? Park users have a right to know what the real health impacts are!

The Freeway Fields project has moved through city planning without provoking as much as a whimper from the planning commission or staff about the site’s poor air quality. Perhaps it is because the mayor has placed the Freeway Fields on his “progressive” agenda. Certainly project consultants must be aware of the political pressure to make the project work. This is city planning at its worst. In a more normal rezoning process where the developer isn’t in the cozy position of also being the permit regulator, such a significant change in land use would require scientific proof about the health and safety of the site.

Land Use and Children

Some in Berkeley may remember the fiasco surrounding a similar project several years ago. The Harrison soccer fields, not far from the proposed Gilman Street site, were suspected of having poor air quality. However, like with the Freeway Fields now, the city argued for the rezoning of the Harrison site based on the idea that the air quality wasn’t that bad, providing children didn’t spend too much time there.

This notion was also supported by the city’s public health officer who publicly stated that the benefit from recreation outweighed any health concerns. The city must have been dismayed when the onsite air monitoring of the Harrison soccer fields revealed a much more extreme picture. The PM10 particulate matter was shown to exceed the state’s health standards more than 100 days a year, forcing the city to post the soccer site with health warnings!

The California State Air Resources Board (ARB) recently updated its land use guidelines for new sensitive land uses, including those associated with congested freeways (100,000 vehicles/day). The ARB identifies playfields at the top of its list of sensitive land uses, and clearly states that locating playfields in high traffic freeway emissions areas should be avoided.

There are numerous studies confirming the association between highway emissions and respiratory problems, including asthma and bronchitis. These problems are all of potential concern at the Gilman site, especially for those already at risk. Before the Freeway Fields are constructed, the City of Berkeley needs to understand more about the site’s exposure levels from both mobile and stationary sources of air pollution.

Unquestionably, Interstate 80 is at its worst during the late afternoon, and is often in a total gridlock for hours. Because the fields would be used the most during the weekday afternoon commute, the worst air emissions would occur when the most children are exerting themselves on the playing fields. And it won’t get better. Freeway traffic and auto emissions at this air quality “hot spot” are only expected to increase.

For those who believe that the Gilman Freeway Fields are sufficiently buffered from air pollution sources at a mere 500 feet or less from I-80, they should be aware that a study released this year by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and the California Department of Health Services suggests that concentrations of freeway emissions can impact downwind receptors up to 1500 feet before diminishing to background levels. That amounts to five football fields, end to end.

With the promise of millions of dollars coming from the state’s Department of Parks and the East Bay Regional Parks District, the City of Berkeley will certainly move forward to build the Freeway Fields. Why haven’t these agencies, which are in the business of parks, voiced their concern over sports fields being sited on a congested freeway exit? The city should be required to monitor the air quality on site for at least a year before development of the proposed sports fields. Not to do so is irresponsible, and perhaps criminal!

Some points in Matthew Artz’s generally accurate Oct. 7 article on Derby Street/East Campus need explanation and clarification. It is not so much that any information in the article is inaccurate, it is that some of it is incomplete.

The first, and probably most significant point, is that Artz’s stated “additional $1.4 million needed to build a regulation baseball diamond…” is not the actual cost of a closed-Derby project. One of my questions to our staff was the additional costs of soft costs (planning, schematics, architectural, engineering, geo and hydrology reports, etc.) and contingency/inflation costs; the response from BUSD staff is that these are typically about 40 percent above construction costs. These soft and contingency costs were not included in the $2.7 million “bare bones” closed-Derby project. Also not included in that “bare bones” estimate were fencing, buffer zones, landscaping, or any other amenities. Any traffic calming/diversion/mitigation from a future environmental impact report are also additional. In other words, that $2.7 million estimate covers merely the cost of a baseball field, nothing else. It is, to me, an entirely unrealistic estimate, but even this unrealistic estimate is about $1.5 million more than BUSD has budgeted for the project. Our own staff estimate for a reasonably complete closed-Derby project is about $4.5 million.

I have to also comment on a quote from Doug Fielding (Association of Sports Fields Users), who is quoted thus: “I think they’re going to come to an agreement [over money] by deciding we don’t need to do this stuff.” “This stuff” that Fielding refers to are such neighborhood necessities as storm drains, recurbing, utility upgrades, and a traffic signal on Carleton (there is currently a traffic signal on Derby and MLK, which would be removed if Derby were closed). Lest anyone believe a traffic signal is not necessary, the Fire Station on Shattuck and Derby needs uninterrupted access across MLK for emergency response. Derby, by the way, is currently designated one of the city’s emergency evacuation routes. With comments such as Mr. Fielding’s, it’s no wonder the neighbors are very very concerned about this project.

As a member of the School Board, I have to deal in the realm of reality. It is nice to wish for a baseball field, it is even legitimate to discuss its possibility, but the reality of shoe-horning a regulation-size baseball field in a tight residential neighborhood, and the subsequent costs involved, are much more than BUSD can bear. The Tuesday Farmers’ Market on Derby and Milvia/MLK has been in existence since 1986, and would be adversely impacted by a “bare bones” closed-Derby project. The full impacts on the Farmers’ Market and the neighborhood by a complete closed-Derby project are not yet fully known, and will not be until a full EIR is performed. In a time of scarce resources, with limited property available, and so many competing needs for BUSD properties, pursuing an expensive and complicated closed-Derby project is not in the best interests of our residents and our city. We could build playing fields on Derby right now; only the desire for a “big-league” ballfield is stalling that possibility.

Steven Donaldson writes on your commentary page Oct. 7 that I used “completely bogus statistics” in describing the industrial sector in West Berkeley as vibrant in my presentation at a meeting of the West Berkeley Alliance of Artisans and Industrial Companies. Actually, I reported well-documented facts that Mr. Donaldson apparently doesn’t like. I said:

• Manufacturing employment in Berkeley, which had declined precipitously from 1981 to 1991, remained very stable from 1991 to 2001—the decade immediately following the city’s establishment of zoning protections for industrial companies and creation of an industrial retention program. The data come directly from the State Employment Development Department (EDD).

• The latest available data, for 2002, (again EDD) show some renewed decline in a period of U.S.-wide manufacturing loss , suggesting additional (non-zoning) action may be needed to restabilize the sector in Berkeley. A significant part of the loss involved a single dotcom firm, however.

• Berkeley, of all East Bay cities, consistently has the lowest industrial vacancy rate for rentable spaces and the highest rent levels for such property. The data come from CB Richard Ellis, Inc. (brokerage company) in their publication East Bay Industrial MarketView, including the latest second quarter 2005 information showing vacancies at 1.2 percent, about one-fifth the level of the next lowest rate city. While the absolute level may be understated in Berkeley and elsewhere because of non-reporting, the fact that Berkeley’s vacancy rate is consistently by far the lowest is indicative of continued market strength.

When Mr. Donaldson made the “bogus” charge at the meeting, I responded with the same information about my sources. Apparently he didn’t listen to the answers.

Mr. Donaldson also seems to have missed, in his haste to brand the diverse 100-plus person gathering as “ideologues,” the major policy points raised by members of the panel and audience at the meeting. I at least heard people saying that:

• Manufacturing is still important because of the good jobs it supplies, the balance it gives to our economy, and its fit with our strong arts and artisans sectors.

• Sensitivity here to such issues as land cost, traffic, and space for growth means we have to be careful about any changes we make in West Berkeley land use policy.

• We may want to adjust our industrial zoning to match the needs of the changing nature of the industrial economy (no one is arguing Donaldson’s straw man that heavy industry is going to grow here).

• Proposals for other land uses should be given close scrutiny. We have the recent history of a dotcom office bubble bursting in other cities. It might have burst here as well had the West Berkeley office proponents of 1990 had their way. Does Berkeley today have a shortage of retail space, or might new retail in West Berkeley weaken our downtown and strong neighborhood shopping areas?

We have an important discussion about West Berkeley to undertake, to which Mr. Donaldson’s name-calling does not contribute, and open public meetings like WeBAIC’s do.

Neil Mayer is a the former director of the Berkeley Office of Economic Development.

We all know the names Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms. We think of these as the great signposts on the familiar highway that is the history of Western music. Looking backwards, the story seems clean, neat, inevitable.

But what then do we do with such messy characters as Tobias Hume, Franz Biber, Johann Zelenka, or even Erik Satie? Are they merely footnotes to Bach or Debussy, able “to swell a progress, start a scene or two,” or are they creative spirits who deserve to be treasured for their own unique works?

The Catalan viola da gamba player Jordi Savall has made it his life’s work to retrieve such sparks of musical genius, not just on his own instrument, but also as a conductor, producer of concerts and records, cinematic music director, teacher and historian. In his hands, categories like ancient and modern, popular and classical, interpretation and improvisation, disappear and we are left with Duke Ellington’s dictum that, “There are only two kinds of music, good music and bad music.”

This month he returns to the Bay Area to conduct the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in Musica de la Noche, a program of works by Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) and Juan Arriaga (1806-1826). Boccherini was an Italian cellist and composer, a follower of Haydn, who was a pioneer in the proto-classical symphony and the string quintet. He spent most of his adult life in Spain working for various royal and noble patrons.

For this concert, the orchestra will perform, appropriately, one of his symphonies and one of his quintets. It is from the quintet that the program takes its name: La musica notturna di Madrid, a piece of descriptive music charting the city’s night sounds, “beginning with the bell of the Ave Maria and ending with a military retreat,” as Boccherini put it.

His Sinfonia No. 23 in D minor “Grande” a più strumenti obbligati, Op. 37 showcases his affinity for minor keys. If you heard the Twentieth Century Chamber Orchestra’s New Year’s Eve performance of another of Boccherini’s orchestral works, Sinfonia in D minor, you may remember that it is known as “from the house of the devil” because it is full of diminished fifths, that is, slightly discordant tritones, the so-called devil’s interval. These minor keys allowed him to express himself beyond the light Italian lyricism that was natural to him.

Juan Arriaga was born the year after Boccherini died and only lived to the age of 20 yet he made a lasting impression on Iberian music. He was known as “the Spanish Mozart,” although more recently, some have adjusted that to “the Basque Mozart.”

For this concert, the orchestra will perform the Overture from Los esclavos felices (The Happy Slaves), the only surviving part of an opera he wrote at thirteen. The program will conclude with another symphony in D, Arriaga’s Sinfonia a grande orquesta in D major.

If you think these composers and works are only of historical interest, you miss what Jordi Savall brings to this kind of music. Where we have been trained to look for masterpieces of composition, perfect musical constructions, Savall is looking for pieces that free the performers in the act of interpreting the music. Western composers then begin to take on some of the qualities of jazz composers who write structures that allow the musicians to complete the composition.

Of course, there is a notated score, but there is something beyond simple mechanical reproduction. When performers of the calibre of Savall and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra respond to composers like Boccherini and Arriaga in this way, be prepared for some of the most beautiful and instantly accessible classical music you have ever heard.

Poet Jack Marshall of El Cerrito, long a familiar figure in the Bay Area writing scene, will read from his new memoir, From Baghdad to Brooklyn; Growing Up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America (Coffee House Press), Tuesday at Black Oak Books at 7:30 p.m.

Born in Brooklyn to an Arabic-speaking Sephardic family, his father from Baghdad, his mother from Aleppo in Syria, Marshall has long written of childhood and adolescence in both his poetry and prose.

“It’s on the tip of my tongue: ‘childhood,’ magical word, conjuring up an endless sky’s pale blue hood pulled back to the horizon,” he writes in the book. “Drawn there not for nostalgia’s sake, but what I am now able to see of what our life was then.”

Marshall writes about his family by creating a fascinating fusion with his reflections and how he saw it growing up, awakening both to the realities of his family and culture and to the world outside. He examines the every day “clash of cultures” and the revelations of adulthood about the background of family conflicts and incongruities. The urge to remember (and “dis-member”) the past and his roots, starts a process, which he writes, begins “to run them together, mix and match the mongrel strains, mingle and merge apparent partitions and genealogical division ... to feed the twin streams into one twined flowing river; not in order to have it both ways, but because of the fact of being both ways.”

Marshall said a number of events spurred him to write the book. Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, his sister died of cancer and letters from their father were found among her papers. Then the war in Iraq came.

“Baghdad may be wiped off the map; my sister gone ... the sense I had of my own age, I had no notion of publishing, at first, just to get down what I could remember,” Marshall said. “And it took on the qualities of an extended dream. Each memory, each short section is, in fact, the center, all to itself ... a panel to slide and recombine with the other vignettes. I’d dig in deep, pull out and start somewhere new—or the memories would come with one suggesting another, moving radically back and forth. Each links together now in more-or-less chronological order, as a total piece combining early memories with what I know now in the bigger scheme of things.”

He writes about his discovery that his retiring father with an English politeness from his years in Britain and his acerbic, even taunting mother, had an arranged marriage after their separate immigration to the States.

If there is a center to this book with a center everywhere, it’s just past the middle, when Marshall, as “a pious yeshiva student” awarded a scholarship to Talmudic Academy (the first Sephardic to be enrolled), begins to question not only the faith of his community, but, as he puts it, “how most people grew up with religion, went along with their family—and nobody ever talked about it that way [questioningly].”

A young friend named Isaac, on a walk home after Hebrew school, laughs “in a loud cackle, with a hiccupping action at the end, like the pop of a cap pistol” after saying to Marshall, “You know, Moses wasn’t a Jew.”

Marshall writes that “His scornful, wild laughter is what I now most remember ... [as] if he had a hand he didn’t need to show.”

Given Freud’s Moses and Monotheism on top of his reading Darwin and “asking obvious disquieting questions I couldn’t answer with inherited models,” Marshall remembers asking himself if “customs were habits, and the repetitions of habit were seductions; [if] tradition and authority were mere holding patterns against the unknown and unpredictable; that, in present fact, nothing from the past could help anymore, and as these moments went on, there was no appeal outside of the present, that each moment of the present was an ongoing beginning as well as an end?”

He remembers “being disturbed .. not so much that what Isaac was saying was true, but that it was conceivable, that it could be true.” He concludes that “each moment—like a flare going out, not some sacred past we owed allegiance to, nor a promised future without immediate substance to its claim—each present moment was the very heart of time.”

Writing in a flexible style that can quickly shift from lyricism to analysis to conversation, Marshall describes the milieu around him as he grows up.

Reading Dylan Thomas and Rimbaud, becoming a poet, and taking, almost on impulse, a berth as a messboy on a freighter heading for West Africa, Marshall ends the memoir with one of the memories which began it. It is a memory that also led to his first book of poems. It was a sense of taking flight, like Darwin’s first land creatures that metamorphose into birds: “I began to have a sense of being closer to the sky, a feeling—which would grow over time in the open sea—that sailing would not be so much floating as flying.”

John Philip Sousa, hailed by Claude Debussy as “the king of American music,” heads up the parade once again. Oh Mr. Sousa!, Ken Malucelli’s 24-number musical biography of the composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and 135 other popular marches will debut at Freight & Salvage Sunday before touring other Bay Area venues.

Originally created by Malucelli for Sousa’s 150th birthday last year, Oh Mr. Sousa! employs nine actors to play 37 roles, including Eastenders’ Peter Matthews and John Hutchinson as the younger and elder Sousa, with opera singer Sheryl Blalock as his wife Jenny. The musical frames the famous songs composed during Sousa’s long and prolific career.

Born in 1854 “in the shadow of the Capitol dome” in Washington D. C., Sousa composed mo re than his signature marches before his death in 1932. He also wrote 16 operettas, 28 fantasias, 24 dances, five overtures and 70 novelty songs, besides penning seven books and 138 articles. Sousa co-founded ASCAP, and was sole composer of all the number s in the first Columbia catalogue.

“He wanted to be the American Gilbert & Sullivan, but he could never find a good lyricist,” Malucelli said. “One conceit I allow myself is taking a patter song he wrote for his operetta Desiree and substituting Gilbert’s lyrics from a number in ‘Ruddigore’—Gilbert & Sousa! And still ‘G & S’!”

Sousa was a big international star at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Malucelli said that 40,000 people once crowded into a pavilion that seated 2,500 to hear him conduc t, 60,000 saw him in New York and 153,000 at the Glasgow Exhibition. He introduced ragtime music to Europe in 1901, though he had a mixed opinion of it, saying, “There’s good jazz and bad jazz, but most of it would scare your grandmother to death!” He hel ped popularize Scott Joplin and the other great Ragtime composers.

“The Stars and Stripes Forever” was declared America’s National March in 1987, and is also the title of the 1952 feature film, with Clifton Webb, Robert Wagner and Debra Paget, that dramatizes Sousa’s life. Many of his famous marches were written by fiat as much as commissioned.

“Chester A. Arthur berated Sousa playing ‘Hail To The Chief’ for him, when Sousa led the Marine Corps band, telling him it was just an old Scottish boating song and told him to come up with something really patriotic,” Malucelli said. “Sousa wrote ‘Semper Fidelis.’ In the meantime, Arthur had died, and it became the Marine’s marching tune. I got a call from Bo Jones, publisher of the Washington Post; in their lob by is a bust of Sousa with the sheet music for ‘The Washigton Post March,’ which he wrote in three days to publicize a school essay contest. That’s a vignette in Act I, with Sousa declaring, ‘It’ll make a man with a wooden leg get up and dance!’”

The Bay Area tour, with four-hand piano accompaniment, will culminate in a birthday tribute at the Napa Opera House, where Sousa played in 1905, with a 22-piece orchestra.

Katrina Benefit with The Cajun All Stars, The Spirit of ‘29 Dixieland Jazz Band, Anne Galjour, Will Durst, Jeff Raz in a benefit for the Southern Arts Federation Hurricane Fund at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $25-$100+ available from 925-798-1300.

Simon Winchester describes “A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906” at 6:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $40, $50 per couple which includes a copy of the book. Sponsored by Cody’s Books. 845-7852.

Autumn is upon us, bringing forth some of the Bay Area’s warmest days. How better to celebrate than with a trip to the coast, not all the way to the Pacific, but just a few miles from home in the town of Alameda. With beaches, lawned picnic and playing areas and a scene-setting visitor center, it would be a challenge not to enjoy the penultimate Trails Challenge Hike at Crown Memorial State Beach and Crab Cove!

The site of today’s regional park in the quaint town of Alameda has a history as rich as its natural resources. From the 1880s to the outbreak of World War II, Crown Memorial was home to the largest amusement center on San Francisco Bay. People in the thousands flocked to spend the day on the beautiful sand beaches and sample the warm shallow waters. Known as “Coney Island of the West” Neptune Beach lived up to its billing with huge saltwater bathing spas featuring sky-high diving platforms, dance pavilion, concerts, roller coaster, prizefights, baseball games, publicity stunts and the invention of the snow cone.

The war brought the festivities to an end. The land was purchased by the government for use as a training base for Merchant Marine commanders. Today’s visitor center occupies the former base infirmary. In 1959 it became a state park and was transferred to regional park status in 1967.

Trails Challenge No. 6: Crown Memorial State Beach-Crab Cove to Bayfarm Island: Five to six miles, rated easy. Options for this hike include following a level paved path for a bike outing or using two cars, one at each end.

The hike begins at the Crab Cove Visitor Center, brimming with exhibits that teach about the unique marine and estuarine environments and the need for their preservation. Outside, an interpretive panel identifies this area as California’s first marine reserve on an estuary.

The center’s exterior welcomes you at first sight. Constructed of driftwood-brown wood trimmed with brick-red and marine-blue and shaded by mature trees, this building would please any number of inhabitants. A spacious outdoor deck is decorated with marine motifs—a bat ray, shark, crab and sea snail—just teasers for the delightful surprises that await you.

Inside you’ll feel you’ve stepped into an underwater environment, worthy of a visitor center award. Walls are painted blue, illustrated and hung with life-size marine models. The ceiling is lowered with narrow cloth panels in watery shades of blue, shaped to resemble waves. Interactive stations and freestanding exhibits make learning fun. One exhibit focuses on invertebrates, in one display comparing crab “innards” to those of humans. Another exhibit compares life at low and high tides, describing mud flats as underground cities.

Multiple aquariums—one holds 800 gallons—teem with the bay’s creatures: perch, sculpin, sand dabs, goby, shark and flounder. An eerily lighted display case reminiscent of Art Deco holds the bay’s alien invaders in sealed jars. Green and mitten crabs, striped bass and a New Zealand sea slug are some of the plants and animals that have made their way into the bay.

Illustrated pier pilings and an old wooden boat suspended from the ceiling remind us of the barnacles, mussels and anemones who call submerged wood structures home. Old wood is also the dominant feature in the Old Wharf Classroom. Here classes are held with participants seated on weathered wood crates gazing at a welcome-aboard plaque, two white life preservers, an illustrated backdrop of an old wharf and a room-wide diorama of bay and estuary life forms. It’s cozy as the hold of a ship. I could almost smell the salt-tanged air.

Finally remembering I was here to hike, I followed the path to Marine Reserve Cove where the park’s rich wildlife was in full display. A flock of Canada geese was sharing the waters with several brown pelicans. The geese were repeatedly dipping their backs, heads and necks into the water, extending their wings and flapping them vigorously; some were even engaged in complete body rotations. The pelicans, meanwhile, performed their own routine by swimming as a group, extending necks and flapping their wings, then scooting across the water. An audience of cormorants occupying a cement jetty extending far into the water were much more sedate, merely opening their wings in the weak morning sun.

Tearing myself away I followed the path into Crown Park consisting of several acres of well-maintained lawns, multiple picnic areas, two fresh-water lagoons, sand dunes and a 2.5-mile shoreline. I passed gaggles of plump Canada geese, some foraging on the lawns, others at attention surrounding a picnic area, as if waiting for the cookout to begin.

Being on foot and wanting to maximize my coastal experience I opted to walk at the water’s edge with firm sand, rather than pavement, below my feet. It’s an odd juxtaposition, ambling on an urban beach. Clumps of seaweed at your feet, small waves lapping on the shore, multihued dune grasses dotting the sandy hills, cool breeze at your face, but across the street multi-storied housing side by side and the San Francisco skyline across the bay. Soon I was lost in the enjoyment of my surroundings and the city seemed far away: beachcombing through assortments of driftwood, shells and rocks; playing the seaweed I.D. game amid the iodine-rich red algae and two types of bright green algae; watching gulls bobbing in the waves; a lone fisherman on his camp-chair, anchored rod awaiting a strike; kayakers and fishing boats cruising the bay.

At the southern end of Shoreline Path stands the Elsie Roemer Bird Sanctuary, the site of an interesting ecological dilemma, that of the endangered California clapper rail versus an invasion of non-native cordgrass.

The California clapper rail once flourished along the coastal marshes of central and northern California. Its clattering call could be heard among salt water, brackish marshes and tidal sloughs. Today that habitat has been reduced to the San Francisco Bay. This endangered bird’s population has actually increased in recent years, in part due to the spread of Spartina alterniflora, an alien species of bright green seven-foot-tall cordgrass choking out native flora and fauna as it slowly converts mudflats to meadows.

The taller denser alterniflora provides more cover, protecting the clapper rail from predators and their nests from washing away with the tides. Now covering more than 1,000 acres, this alien has upset the delicate ecological balance of the estuary and drastically reduced diversity. This is especially true in the case of native pickleweed, an important habitat for the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.

Standing at the end of the observation platform I looked out over the sea of cordgrass, beautiful but dangerous. Under gunpowder gray skies, the bright green and yellow stalks stood out in proud defiance, strongly asserting their strength. Nearby, placards warned of upcoming plans to clean up this botanical pest, signaling that a choice had been made.

Choices abound to prolong this estuarine adventure. A bike path and road continue over a bridge to Bayfarm Island where homes built around lagoons and Shoreline Park offer a more recent environment for exploring. If you prefer going back in time, amble down Alameda’s Park Street or Webster Street where yesterday and today meld pleasantly with browse-worthy shops and mouth-watering eateries that will satisfy everyone in your party.

East Bay Regional Park District Trail Challenge: For more information, call 562-PARK, or see www.ebparks.org.

Getting there: Take I-580 east to I-980 (Downtown Oakland). Exit I-980 at 11th/12th Streets, turn left on Fifth Street, continue through the Oakland/Alameda Tube to Webster Street. Turn right on Central to reach the Crab Cove entrance at McKay Avenue.

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Cihan Tugal, Prof. Sociology, on “Transformation of Religious Politics in Turkey.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For reservations call 526-2925.

“Economic and Business Impact of Hurricane Katrina on the US” a teach-in at 1:05 p.m. at The Wells Fargo Room of the Haas School of Business, UC Campus, followed by panels on Managing in a Crisis and Rebuild-

ing New Orleans. For more information see www.haas.berkeley.

edu/news/Katrina_teachin.html.

BOSS Graduation and Gratitude Gala honoring men and women who have overcome homelessness, disabilities, addiction, and other challenges to turn their lives around at 5:30 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St., Oakland. Tickets $50. 649-1930.

“Cleaning Up Diesel: Fuels and Technologies” a workshop in downtown Oakland sponsored by the Ditching Dirty Diesel Collaborative from 1 to 5 p.m. RSPVP to 302-3316.

Hills Emergency Forum for residents of Berkeley, El Cerrito and Oakland to reduce the risk of wildland fire, at 10 a.m. at the El Cerrito Community Center, 7007 Moeser Lane. www.lbl.gov/ehs/hef/

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m.

Womansong Circle with Betsy Rose at 7:15 at First Congregatioanl Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Donation $10-$20. 525-7082.

By the Light of the Moon Open mic and salon for women at 7:30 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 655-2405.

Berkeley Chess Club at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. 845-1041.

Berkeley Garden Club Plant Sale from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 313 Victoria, off Fairmont in El Cerrito, near the Plaza Bart Station. 528-4940.

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of the West Berkeley working class neighborhoods from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0181.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. at the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234.

Emeryville Harvest Festival Live music, children’s activities, pumpkin patch and more from noon to 4 p.m. at Bay Street. www.baystreetemeryville.com

“Designed for Space Travel” An exhibition of space artifacts, from spacesuits to space food at the Chabot Space and Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. 336-7300.

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Light Search and Rescue from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 997 Cedar St. To sign up call 981-5605.

“The Kindness of Strangers: A Benefit for Rebuilding the Spirit of Community in the Gulf States” with The Cajun All Stars, The Spirit of '29 Dixieland Jazz Band and many others at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $25-$100, available from 925-798-1300.

“Who’s Winning the Evolution Wars?” with Glenn Branch, National Ctr for Science Education, at 10 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Sponsored by Secular Humanists of the East Bay. 848-6137.

“Kids in Creeks” A class for edcators of K-12 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Prospect Sierra School, 2060 Tapscott Ave., El Cerrito. Cost is $25. Sponsored by the Watershed Project. 665-3539.

Berkeley Public Library Teen Amnesty Week through Sat. Oct. 22. Teens, bring your high school ID, and the Berkeley Public Library will work with you to clear your library record. 981-6135, 548-1240 (TTY).

Bay Area Youth with LGBT Parents Film “In My Shoes: Stories of Youth With LGBT Parents” followed by discussion at 3 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5. 415-861-5437.

El Cerrito Historical Society features a presentation on two unique residential facilities that supported Chinese orphan children in the Bay Area, at 2 p.m. at the El Cerrito Senior Center, behind the El Cerrito Library, at 6510 Stockton Ave. 525-1730.

Hands-on Bike Maintenance Learn how to do a bicycle safety inspection at 10 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Bring your bike and tools. 527-4140.

Introduction to Rhythmic Improvisation A workshop with Danny Bittker and Jeremy Steinkoler from 2 to 4 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20-$50 sliding scale. 525-5054.

Mini-Rangers at Tilden Park Join us for an afternoon of nature study, conservation and rambling through the woods and water. Dress to get dirty, and bring a healthy snack to share. For children age 8-12, unaccompanied by their partents. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684.

“Ending Hunger and Poverty in the US and Africa” A workshop from 4 to 6 p.m. followed by a dinner fundraiser for the Food First/Institute for Food Development and Policy at Jack London Aquatic Center, 115 Embarcadero. For reservations call 654-4400, ext. 234. www.foodfirst.org

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll have a treasure hunt from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684.

Tilden Explorers An after-school nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds, who may be accompanied by an adult. We will have a nature treasure hunt from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684.

South Berkeley Community Church Capital Restoration Campaign with speakers on the history of South Berkeley, at 7:30 p.m. at 1802 Fairview St. at Ellis. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. Suggested donation of $15 benefits the church’s restoration campaign. 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. 238-3234.

“Gaza First or Gaza Last” a lecture with Marcia Freedman, Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace at 7 p.m. in the Dinner Boardroom, GTU Hewlett Library, 2400 Ridge Rd. 649-2482.

“Intellegent Design: A Unique View of Globalization and Science” with Dr. Gunther Stent at 7:30 p.m. at International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Cost is $5. 642-9460.

Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College Open House at 6 p.m. at 2550 Shattuck Ave. Tours of classrooms and clinics and information for prospective students. To RSVP call 666-8248, ext. 106.

Community Gathering at the Berkeley Drop-In Center from 7 to 8:30 p.m. to meet staff and members and discuss future activities, at 3234 Adeline St. 652-9462.

Berkeley Public Library Teen Amnesty Week through Sat. Oct. 22. Teens, bring your high school ID, and the Berkeley Public Library will work with you to clear your library record. 981-6135, 548-1240 (TTY).

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll have a treasure hunt from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684.

“Adventures of a Wildlife Photographer” From Kenya to the Alameda Wildlife Refuge, with Eleanor Bricetti at 7:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Sponsored by the Golden Gate Audobon Society. www.goldengateaudobon.org

Lights On Afterschool Berkeley’s after school programs will be open to the public from 4 to 7 p.m. with student performances, special activities, art projects, food and fun. Start at 3 p.m. at Civic Center Park. 883-6146. www.afterschoolalliance.org

Leaders of the Draft Ron Dellums movement said they believe that the former Congressmember did not make a decision to run for mayor of Oakland in next year’s election until minutes before he mounted the stage at Laney College Friday to make his announcement.

In a dramatic moment, Dellums told a standing-room-only crowd of supporters in the Laney College Auditorium, as well as a battery of television cameras, “If Ron Dellums running for mayor gives you hope, then let’s get on with it.”

The audience leaped to its feet, and the roar of approval was deafening.

But leaders of the three-month-long campaign that collected 8,000 signatures on petitions asking Dellums to run say an even more dramatic moment came a half-hour before in a Laney conference room when organizers made a final pitch to convince the retired Oakland-Berkeley congressman to enter the race to become Oakland’s next mayor.

“We had about 30 people up there, and it was very emotional,” said Oakland educator Kitty Kelly Epstein, one of the draft Dellums leaders. “One by one, people got up and made their case for why Ron should run. People talked about the future of Oakland. There were tears in people’s eyes, including Ron’s.”

Epstein said that while Dellums told supporters he appreciated their support, he gave no indication of what his response to the petition campaign would be.

Both Epstein and Oakland Black Caucus Chair Geoffrey Pete, another petition campaign leader, said they had talked before the meeting with several people close to Dellums and realized that none of them was sure of Dellums’ intentions.

After the presentations, Dellums said he needed to speak with his wife, Cynthia, and the room in the administration building was cleared to allow the two of them to talk in private. From there, the two walked the short distance across the Laney campus to the auditorium, where hundreds of Oakland activists as well as a throng of local political leaders had gathered to hear his announcement, greeting the former congressman with chants of “Run, Ron, run!” and “Si, se puedes!”

Even then, at first, Dellums did not reveal his plans.

“I’m mounting this podium like a jazz musician,” he said. “I don’t know how this song will end until I get to the last note.”

Pete said he suspected that Dellums had actually prepared two separate speeches for the Laney event, one of which announced his running, but the other that explained a decision not to run.

When Dellums said, at the beginning of the speech, that “When people approached me about running, I took it very seriously,” Pete said that his heart sank. “It sounded like he was preparing to say ‘I appreciate the effort, but I can’t,’ It was an emotional rollercoaster.”

The coaster took a sharp turn moments later, when Dellums began a riff in the speech that stopped talking about whether he would run and began speculating about “what a Dellums for mayor campaign would be like.”

In the front row of the audience another pensive draft Dellums organizer, veteran Oakland political activist Gene Hazzard, flashed a grin that grew wider and wider and never left his face until the end of the speech. The raucous response from the audience became more like a tent revival than a political meeting or a press conference, with people beginning to shout “Yes!” and “Hallelujah!”

At one point, when Dellums said that he would not have run without the approval of his wife, someone shouted out, “Thank you, Cynthia!”

Shortly after the end of his speech, while followers and politicians milled around the stage, Dellums’ cell phone rang, and he held a brief conversation under the glare of the television camera lights. He explained that it had been a call from Rep. Barbara Lee, who had been his aide while he was in Congress. Lee replaced him in office in 1998.

In throwing his hat in the ring to replace outgoing, term-limited Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, Dellums tried to downplay expectations.

“Only in the comic books does someone go into a telephone booth and change their clothes and come out as Superman,” he said. “No one individual can make the kinds of changes in this community you are looking for. It can only be done as a community.”

He said that his goal as mayor would be to use Oakland as an example of the way local citizens can work to solve regional and national problems, leaving no one behind.

“Wouldn’t it be magnificent if the gateway to this community read ‘Welcome To Oakland, The Model City’?” he asked. “A city where we came together to grapple with every issue that exists that affects the human condition. We could start a dialogue about universal health care in this incredible community and work to put together a system that guarantees health care for every citizen. Win or lose, wouldn’t that be a magnificent journey?”

Taking a dig at Oakland’s developer-oriented government, he also downplayed the charges that this would be a solely African-American campaign to return a black mayor to office in Oakland.

“The strength of Oakland is in its diversity,” he said. “Development is wonderful. Development is necessary. But when the dust settles and the smoke clears, we must embrace the principle that all of Oakland’s diverse community must move forward together. That’s the principle we must embrace. No portion of this community should be standing in line saying ‘I’m waiting for my turn.’ This will be a multi-cultural and multi-racial campaign and administration.”

Even before his announcement, prospects of a Dellums campaign was already shaking up the 2006 Oakland mayor’s race.

Oakland School Advisory Board member Greg Hodge, an announced mayoral candidate, had earlier indicated that he would consider dropping out of the mayoral race if Dellums entered. Shortly after the Dellums speech he deferred an announcement, saying that “Out of respect, I need to meet, first, with the people who have been supporting my campaign.”

He also said he wanted to speak with Dellums first, if possible, before making a decision.

“It’s my personal feeling to defer to Dellums because of his stature, and because I wouldn’t want to divide the African-American community or the progressive vote in Oakland,” Hodge said. “My preference would be to work with him in areas that I am familiar with, particularly education issues.”

A second candidate, Oakland School Advisory Board member Dan Siegel, was also leaning toward dropping out in favor of Dellums.

“He will be a strong, progressive candidate,” Siegel said by telephone on Monday. “I’m inclined to think that I should support him, but before I do so, I need to talk both with him and with my supporters.”

A third candidate, Alameda County Treasurer Don White, had said when Dellums’ name first surfaced as a possible mayoral candidate that he would consider dropping out if Dellums ran. Neither White nor another candidate, Oakland City Councilmember Nancy Nadel, was available for comment.

On Monday morning, a calendar on Nadel’s website listed a series of campaign community meetings through October, and sources who had talked with her last week said that she had indicated no plans to leave the campaign.

One candidate who will almost certainly not drop out is Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente. In a television interview shortly after the Dellums announcement on Friday, De La Fuente said that he was looking forward to the upcoming campaign.

“Is he the front-runner?” De La Fuente asked. “Absolutely, and that’s fine. I’ve always been the underdog and I’ve always managed to show people I can get things done.”

The first round of the Oakland mayor’s election will be held in June. If no one receives more than half the vote, the two top candidates will compete in a runoff in November.

According to Luis Damerell, until last year living near the corner of Allston Way and Ninth Street seemed like a nightmare.

“The streets were filled with drug dealers and thugs,” he said. “People were afraid to go outside. It was like being in a lockdown situation.”

These days, Damerell said, the situation has improved.

The change, he said, wouldn’t have happened if not for Neighborhood Solutions, a three-year-old Oakland nonprofit that helps neighbors fight nuisance properties by filing small claims court lawsuits against the property owners.

In Damerell’s neighborhood, 23 people sued James Ross, who they said allowed dealers to sell drugs and hold rowdy parties at his home on the corner of Ninth and Allston. They won a ruling for $115,000, and although they haven’t collected a cent, they succeeded in pressuring Ross to sell his home.

The case was the first victory in Berkeley for Neighborhood Solutions, and it further established the organization as a major player in the East Bay’s fight against problem properties, so much so that Oakland officials now refer residents to the organization.

Since the ruling against Ross, Neighborhood Solutions has forced UC Berkeley Co-op Le Chateau to pay neighbors $32,500 for years of unruly behavior and made the owner of a burnt-out building on Spaulding Street clean up the property, which neighbors said was home to drug addicts. It now has six pending nuisance cases in Berkeley.

The most celebrated one is a group of neighbors suing Lenora Moore, a 75-year-old Berkeley woman whose family members have been repeatedly arrested for selling drugs near her home and on other charges.

With a court date scheduled for Thursday, Moore’s allies have emerged as the organization’s sharpest critics.

“They’re going against the spirit of what small claims court is supposed to do,” said Osha Neumann, an attorney who is advising Moore. “I don’t think we’re getting a neighborhood solution out of Neighborhood Solutions.”

Humble beginnings

Neighborhood Solutions is the creation of Grace Neufeld, a life-long Oakland resident, who lives in the Maxwell Park area. In 1994, as the neighborhood block captain, Neufeld participated in a successful smalls claims court suit against the owner of a neighboring house, where the tenants kept pit bulls that Neufeld said terrorized the neighborhood.

The case was organized by Safe Streets Now, which lost city funding in Oakland shortly afterwards when one of its members was charged with cocaine trafficking.

Having learned the ropes of preparing small claims court cases, Neufeld, a graphic designer and publisher by trade, led neighbors in a suit against the owner of the local liquor store she said was a center for drug dealing.

The neighbors prevailed and after the store closed down, Neufeld said she started getting inquiries from other neighborhood leaders to help them initiate lawsuits.

In 2002, two years after she stopped publishing her monthly newspaper, The Pet Companion, she formed Neighborhood Solutions. As executive director, she helps clients document neighborhood nuisances and leads them through the process of filing a small claims case. In most of her cases, several plaintiffs seek the maximum of $5,000 to pressure the property owner to end the nuisance.

The nonprofit has not been a money-maker for Neufeld, who relies on her husband’s business reselling unwanted storage items for her income. She asks clients for donations, but only receives compensation when her clients collect on their court victories, a rarity in small claims cases.

To date Neufeld, whose fee is 30 percent of the settlement award, said she has collected about $25,000 from two cases.

“I’m not doing this for the money,” said Neufeld, who keeps the organization’s telephone number unlisted. “A lot of the people I work with can’t afford upfront fees. I don’t think they should be prevented from having this option available to them.”

The fee structure, which Neufeld sees as egalitarian, Neumann said gives her an incentive to push neighbors into court.

“She has a financial interest in pursuing that solution,” he said.

Neufeld said that only about one-third of her cases ever goes to court, and that in most circumstances a demand letter from neighbors or mediation solves the dispute.

Opponents

For cases that do go to court, Neumann said Neighborhood Solutions is exploiting the small claims process.

“In the case of Lenora Moore, they’re using small claims court to make a family sell its house. That’s not the mission of the court,” he said. Neumann said a court case won’t help Moore’s neighbors, because even if Moore loses she won’t sell her home.

Neumann added that the neighbors, with the backing of Neufeld and her nonprofit’s advisory board, had an unfair advantage over the defendants in preparing their cases.

“The neighbors are much better positioned than Lenora is,” he said. “There is some kind of fundamental unfairness there that doesn’t seem right.”

Neighborhood Solutions has won about 90 percent of cases that have gone to trial, according to Neufeld.

Neumann blamed city and county officials for not doing more to solve the issues surrounding Moore, who recently sought and received stay-away orders against six of her family members who have drug arrests.

“Why hadn’t the DA issued stay-away orders before?” he said. “People were being busted there repeatedly.”

Officials say the group serves a niche

Some of Neighborhood Solutions’ staunchest supporters are city workers who handle problem properties.

“I think they’ve been pretty effective,” said Michael Caplan, who coordinated the city’s response to the Ross house at Ninth and Allston. “We’re having movement on nuisance properties that have been problems for years.”

“This is a huge city with a lot of issues,” she said. “There isn’t enough manpower to hold people’s hands through every nuisance problem.”

Caplan said he doesn’t refer residents to Neighborhood Solutions, but if, after exhausting other avenues, they ask for the group’s phone number, he’ll supply it.

When it comes to dealing with nuisance properties, Caplan said Neighborhood Solutions’ reliance on civil law is often more effective than the city’s tools for criminal enforcement.

“It’s fundamentally challenging to enforce against minor quality of life crimes by using the police,” he said.

Caplan said by the time police respond to a call for service there are often no grounds to make an arrest. In the case of the Ross house, he said, the city in one week spent over $30,000 on police surveillance. The operation led to arrests and cut back on the nuisance, but within weeks, he said, the problem had returned.

Neighborhood Solutions instructs clients to document what they call quality of life violations, such as harassment, loitering and late-night noise, in preparation for a small claims court trial. Neufeld said cities are often less effective at solving major nuisance cases because they fear being sued and they can’t be seen to favor one side or the other.

Last year, Oakland passed a law giving the city new authority to fine the owners of problem properties. Sanders-West said that despite the new law, residents still prefer civil action. “The municipal process takes a lot of time,” she said. “People want a way to move forward with their concerns.”

Sanders-West said Neighborhood Solutions has helped residents who are at their wits’ end over a nuisance, but said the small claims court route hasn’t been a cure-all.

Since it is difficult for plaintiffs to receive the damage awards won in court—often victorious plaintiffs must file liens and wait until the property is sold—a court victory doesn’t always end the nuisance, she said.

“For a few months there’s a change,” she said, “but when people realize they can’t go after them for damages, they go back to their old habits.”

Gentrification

Several of those helping Lenora Moore, who is African-American, question whether the action by her neighbors, some of whom are themselves African-American, is a tool of gentrification.

“This is a case of long-term homeowners being ganged up on by people with much more resources that are trying to change the make-up of the neighborhood,” said Leo Stegman, a paralegal with the East Bay Community Law Center, who is serving Moore outside his role with the law center.

“These are Berkeley people,” said Andrea Pritchard of Copwatch, noting that Moore has owned the house since 1963, and it has been in her family since 1916. “It’s our responsibility to lift them up, not kick them out.”

Neufeld said her work was not about gentrification.

“It’s more about people defending the right to have people in their own house,” she said.

She said several of her current cases involve mostly African American plaintiffs, including a case on Fifth Street in West Berkeley where she is helping a group of African American residents organize against a white property owner she says has allowed tenants to create a neighborhood nuisance.

The Clients

Shomari Mustafa and Rashida Mustafa Mohamed of Chester Street in West Oakland worked with Neufeld on a suit against their next-door neighbor. They said the neighbor sold drugs, defaced their car and threatened to assault them. After winning $7,000 in damages, they are now in mediation with the family.

“Grace has been a Godsend to us,” said Mustafa, adding that he believed he would have ended up trading blows with his neighbors if Neufeld had not gotten involved.

“She said, ‘Sister Rashida, shoot them with the camera.’ Mustafa Mohamed said. “It worked,” she added. “Without her we wouldn’t have had time to fill out the paper work for court and without the ruling we wouldn’t be having serious mediation discussions.”

The couple said they would recommend Neighborhood Solutions to neighbors, but Neufeld said for now she wasn’t doing much work in Oakland.

Youth Radio, Berkeley’s award-winning media outlet for East Bay high school-aged students, is planning to move to Oakland.

The youth-run organization that won a Peabody Award three years ago is planning to purchase a three-story building at 1701 Broadway in Oakland, according to a staff member who asked to remain anonymous. Sid Ewing, of real estate brokerage firm C B Richard Ellis, said the property is in escrow but would not say who the buyer is.

Neither party would name the purchase price or predict Youth Radio’s planned move-in date.

Youth Radio has been looking to buy a building for the past three years, said Patrick Kennedy, who owns the group’s current headquarters at 1809 University Ave.

The new location in Oakland would give Youth Radio five times more space than its current home.

“We’ve been bursting at the seams for the past few years,” a Youth Radio executive told the Daily Planet. Currently Youth Radio has only one recording studio, forcing students to wait in line to produce segments.

About 40 to 45 percent of Youth Radio participants hail from Oakland, more than from any other city.

Youth Radio had tried to buy a larger space in Berkeley near a BART stop. According to Kennedy, Youth Radio nearly closed a deal to buy a building on Shattuck Avenue near the corner of Cedar Street. Kennedy added that Youth Radio’s lease ran through 2007, but contains a provision allowing the organization to leave earlier.

Berkeley High teacher Rick Ayers, who has worked with Youth Radio to train students and install Berkeley High’s sound studio, said he didn’t think the move to Oakland would affect Berkeley High students.

“It makes it a little less convenient to go there, but I think it will be fine for us,” he said.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington said Youth Radio officials had already alerted him of the impending move.

“We’re glad that they found a place to enable them to expand,” he said. “I’m sure Berkeley people will still be involved.”

Youth Radio received more than $2.5 million in contributions in 2003, according to tax statements and ended the year with more than $1.6 million in net assets.

The 20,235-square-foot building at 1701 Broadway was listed for $3.1 million, said Barbara Kami of Ellwood Patrick Ellwood Commercial Real Estate.

Youth Radio got its start in Berkeley 13 years ago with a handful of high school students. Now, with funding from major Bay Area foundations, the station teaches radio journalism to about 200 East Bay youth from Union City to Richmond.

Besides being an Internet radio outlet, Youth Radio produces segments for local stations including KQED and KPFA.

In 2002 Youth Radio won the Peabody Award for “enabling thousands of teenagers to express their views, to experience civic engagement and to develop critical thinking skills, teamwork and self-esteem.”

The next year, the National Association of Black Journalists awarded Youth Radio its “Salute to Excellence” honors for a radio documentary examining Oakland’s soaring murder rate through the eyes of a teenager.

When Khawaja Ashraf of Berkeley learned Saturday that a major earthquake had devastated his native Pakistan, he immediately telephoned relatives still living in the country.

“My cousins live in the same area as the apartment buildings that collapsed in Islamabad, but they are OK,” said Ashraf, president of the Pakistani-American Conference and a native of Lower Punjab, which sustained relatively few casualties from the 7.6-magnitude earthquake that has claimed an estimated 20,000 lives throughout the area as a whole.

Though Ashraf had no difficulty telephoning relatives, all of whom were unhurt, he said acquaintances reported being unable to contact family members who lived closer to the earthquake’s epicenter, Muzaffarabad, the capitol of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir—about 60 miles northeast of Islamabad, the nation’s capitol.

“One person had to call someone from a nearby town and ask him to go on foot to see if his relatives had survived,” he said.

Ashraf said the Pakistani-American Conference, which comprises over 400 organizations, held a conference call yesterday to coordinate aid shipments.

“From what we have been told, people are out in the cold with no food, warm clothes, blankets, medicine, nothing at all,” he said.

Mohammed Sherali, an 18-year-old employee at the Naan ‘N Curry on College Avenue, said he made sure his family in Lahore was safe, but otherwise has been too busy working to follow news of the earthquake.

“I went to mosque Friday right before it happened, so I have not had a chance to discuss it very much,” he said.

Both Ashraf and Sherali praised other countries for sending relief missions, including Pakistan’s rival, India, which has pledged 25 tons of needed supplies.

“It’s nice of them,” Sherali said. “We need the help.”

Ashraf said the international relief was critical because Pakistan was ill-equipped to deal with a major earthquake. “There was no equipment to pull people out of rubble,” he said.

UC Berkeley students are collecting donations for earthquake victims, said Sunaena Chhatry, president of the Association of South Asian Political Activists, which is working with UC Berkeley’s Pakistani Student Association and INDUS, a South Asian cultural group.

Ashraf, who also publishes the Berkeley-based online newspaper, PakistanWeekly.com, said an East Bay fundraiser was being scheduled for Sunday from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Chandani Restaurant, 5748 Mowry School Road in Balentine Plaza, Newark.

For those who can’t attend the fundraiser, Ashraf recommended that donations be mailed to: Embassy of Pakistan, 3517 International Court, NW, Washington, D.C.. 20008.

A magnitude 2.7 earthquake—not strong enough to do damage but enough to awaken a Daily Planet reporter—rumbled through the Berkeley hills early Sunday morning.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, the epicenter of the quake, which struck at 2:01 a.m., was 3.8 miles beneath the intersection of The Uplands and Hillcrest just inside the city’s southernmost border with Oakland.

The USGS received 858 reports from people who felt the quake, the largest numbers from Berkeley and North Oakland, and including 1 from Palo Alto, 49 miles away from the epicenter.

For amateur seismologists, the easiest way to check for Bay Area shakers is at the USGS map site, found at http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Maps/122-38.html.

Photo by Jakob Schiller: Hayward resident Ronnie Yellowhair, a Navajo and a member of the Traditional Men’s Dance Group, performs an inter-tribal dance at the Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebration at Martin Luther King Jr. Park on Saturday..

Citizens concerned about the impacts of a proposed 173-unit condominium project planned for 700 University Ave. will have a chance to raise their questions Thursday afternoon.

That’s when the city of Berkeley’s Planning Department will hold a 4 to 6 p.m. scoping session in their second floor conference room at 2118 Milvia St. to help prepare an environmental impact report (EIR) on the project.

Urban Housing Group (UHG), a San Mateo firm which specializes in development of mixed-use residential and commercial projects at urban transit hubs, wants to tear down the buildings housing Brennan’s Restaurant and Celia’s Mexican Restaurant to make way for two four- and five-story buildings featuring housing built atop ground floor commercial spaces.

The project site includes the block bounded by Fourth Street on the east and the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks on the west between Addison Street and University Avenue.

If all goes as planned, Brennan’s would move into the landmarked railroad station at the northwest corner of the lot—although a notice recently on display inside the pub said that “Brennan’s has not had any negotiations with UHG to decide the future of our building and our business.”

While Brennan’s has several years remaining on its lease, Celia’s is renting on a month-by-month basis, said manager Carlos Robles, who has been with the restaurant since it first opened in West Berkeley in 1977.

While Celia’s has opened a new restaurant in Hayward, Robles said the owner is looking for a new location in Berkeley. In the interim, the Mexican eatery continues serve its loyal customers at their present location at 2040 Fourth St.

UHG is a subsidiary of Marcus and Millichap Co., a leading national real estate investment brokerage. Chair George M. Marcus is a member of the University of California Board of Regents and an advisor to the Haas Real Estate Group of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

The project generated opposition from Berkeley preservationists, leading to applications by Gale Garcia to give landmark protections to both restaurant buildings. Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) awarded structure of merit status to the Celia’s building, a decision later overturned by the City Council.

But a pair of recent California appellate court decisions have held that recognition of a building’s historical merit by an expert body like the LPC, even though later overturned by a higher, non-expert body like the City Council, is sufficient to require a full environmental impact report when a project calls for demolition of the building.

Another set of objections which had focused on the possibility that archaeological remains from the leveled West Berkeley shellmound might be present on the site were dismissed after soil core samples showed no evidence of artifacts or human remains.

As currently planned, the project will consist of two buildings, a smaller one on the north end of the property running between Fourth Street and a parking lot for the railroad station and a larger structure at the southern end running the full width of the property between Fourth Street and the tracks.

The smaller building would contain 60 residential units over ground floor commercial and parking, while the larger building would house 113 residential units with no retail. The project calls for 31 of the units to be marketed at so-called affordable rates.

In addition, plans call for 214 parking spaces for cars and 24 spaces for bicycles.

Thursday’s scoping session will gather public comments to be used in determining the full scope of the EIR.

For those unable to attend the meeting, the city will also take written comments through next Monday. They should be addressed to City of Berkeley, Current Planning, Attention: Greg Powell, 2118 Milvia St., Berkeley 94704.

The city’s initial study on the project can be found on the Internet at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/planning.

That document identified seven different areas where the project could have significant impacts, including aesthetics, air quality, cultural resources, geology and soils, hazards and hazardous material, hydrology and water quality, land use and planning, noise and transportation/traffic.?

The closing credits scene in the hour-long documentary Soul of Justice: Thelton Henderson’s American Journey could take its title from the Lonne Elder play: Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.

Three white-haired, white-bearded black men—old friends—gather in a kitchen, singing the old doo-wop standard “Speedo.” The song title is an ironic twist, since the three men represent not speed, but the long, patient, often dignified, and sometimes majestic struggle of African-Americans to enter the mainstream of California and American life. One of the men, Troy Duster, is a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The second is Russ Ellis, a former UCB Vice Chancellor. The third, Berkeley resident Thelton Henderson, is a United States District Judge, and despite his low-key demeanor, one of the most powerful men in the state.

Produced and directed by local filmmaker Abby Ginzberg, a lawyer who once taught at the UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School herself, Soul of Justice documents just how remarkable Henderson’s journey has been through a blend of television file footage and shooting that includes interviews with the judge and his long list of associates and admirers. The film made its debut at the Mill Valley Film Festival last weekend.

It starts in depression-era Los Angeles, where Henderson’s mother moved from her native Louisiana looking for a better life . Athletics took Henderson to the University of California in the early 1950s, the pre-affirmative action days when he was one of only 17 African-Americans in a class of 1,500. After an injury ended his college football career, his attention to studies gained him entry to Boalt Hall. At that time, says Boalt classmate Henry Ramsey (a former California Superior Court judge himself), Boalt admitted only one African-American a year. “Whenever there were two admitted in a given year,” Ramsey continues, “one was being flunked out.”

Before he graduated from Boalt, Henderson was recruited as the only African-American attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Kennedy Justice Department, and in that capacity the film follows him as he was both an eyewitness and a participant in the most dangerous and tumultuous period of the southern civil rights era, running from admission of the first black—James Meredith—to the University of Mississippi, through the assassination of Medgar Evers, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and the beginnings of the struggles in Selma that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

“Walking around in that suit and tie, he was in some danger,” civil rights veteran Andrew Young says in one of the film’s interviews. “He was just another nigger, to put it bluntly, although I don’t think he realized that.”

Picked by Jimmy Carter to be one of the first black federal judges in modern times, Henderson’s judicial career runs through the center of many of the most pressing and divisive issues of our time: the 1970s black prison movement led by Soledad Brother George Jackson, the protest against the slaughter of dolphins by tuna fisheries, the affirmative action battles culminating in Henderson’s unconstitutionality ruling on Ward Connerly’s Proposition 209, and returning to the prison struggles to issue rulings against prison guard brutality.

Many of his decisions are considered landmarks of progressive law, including forcing both the tuna industry and the federal government to protect the dolphins, as well as, most recently, putting prisoner health care in California under federal control after prison officials admitted they couldn’t do the job themselves.

Along the way, the film shows how Henderson has gained the enmity of some of the more influential political figures of our time, including Connerly and Republican congressional leader Tom Delay, who is famously shown in the documentary accusing Henderson of being a judge “drunk with power” and calling for his impeachment.

Filmmaker Abby Ginzberg says that her hope for the project is that “it will serve as a provocative introduction to some of the most troubling social issues of the day—the role of the federal courts, the future of affirmative action, the need for and the difficulty of prison reform, the challenge of being a black man in authority in America, and the need to protect the constitutional rights of the dispossessed.” She said she picked Henderson as her subject because “his was a compelling and important American story, and if I did not tell it, it would not get told.”

Soul of Justice shows a man behind all of this action hardly susceptible to any kind of intoxication, with power or anything else. It is the portrait of a quiet, thoughtful man, appearing shy and reserved in his conversations, but with a steely moral core that comes out stated in even tones, rather than shouted.

Speaking of his time as a federal monitor during the civil rights period, Henderson talks of the quiet agony he felt trying to reconcile his roles as a black man and a government official. “I kept asking myself, was I going to be Joe Friday and just get the facts, ma’am, or was I going to hurl myself into the face of injustice and fight it,” he says. “I’ve never resolved that.”

If Thelton Henderson hasn’t resolved that contradiction, Soul of Justice shows that in our lifetime, he did a better job at it than most.

After Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, the nation’s ethnic media tracked the grassroots efforts of ethnic communities to find and shelter their own. Now, ethnic media editors and activists report, those community networks are strained to the breaking point.

Giao Pham, associate managing editor for Nguoi-Viet Daily News, traveled to the Gulf region shortly after the storm. Pham reported for the Westminster (Calif.)-based paper on a Vietnamese mall in Houston that became a meeting place for storm survivors. From there, many Vietnamese sought shelter in area churches and convents.

Today, “Vietnamese are still living in churches and temples in Houston and Baton Rouge” and resources are stretched thin, Pham said in an interview. Pham says he spoke recently with Father Hung of St. Le Van Phung Catholic Church in Baton Rouge. “He told me that since the hurricane, the church has spent about $20,000 extra in utility bills and other expenses” to house about 300 Vietnamese evacuees.

Temple and church leaders, Pham stresses, remain firm in their commitment to provide shelter. “They know these Vietnamese families can’t stay forever, but they are waiting for a sufficient policy from the federal government” before sending any families onward. Church and temple leaders “all say that,” Pham says.

Minh Thu Lynagh of Greensboro, N.C., calls herself a “professional volunteer” who went to Biloxi, Miss., and other Gulf cities about a week after Katrina. Lynagh, who helped Vietnamese boat people resettle in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s as a public health worker, confirms Pham’s view of growing pressures at the grassroots level.

“I’ve talked to some people in churches and nonprofits and they’re totally exhausted,” she says. “Their staffs are small.”

Syndicated black media commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson points to the irony that millions of dollars in disaster-relief donations and taxes for homeland defense have not reached effective, frontline relief efforts.

“You hear stories about the southern part of Louisiana—the Creole, Cajun, Native American communities and small towns—getting no help from the Red Cross and FEMA,” Hutchinson said in an interview. Still, some black churches and citizen volunteers have done a “marvelous job” even without “a nickel” from federal agencies, Hutchinson says.

The Vietnamese fisherman community on the Gulf Coast, activist Lynagh says, “has very low education, even in Vietnamese. They didn’t even know the difference between the Red Cross and FEMA.” Many, she says, have no bank accounts.

Lynagh says she and other Vietnamese activists have workable plans to link Vietnamese communities across the country to help with mid-term relocation and long-term employment of storm survivors. But “with no money, you can’t get any money and can’t achieve those goals.”

In a letter to the editor of the Washington Afro-American titled “Help Me!,” Toni Gaines and Warren Newton pled for funds for their former pastor, the Rev. Lowell Case of St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Baton Rouge, La., whose church is aiding evacuees.

Twenty to 25 evacuees are staying at parishioners’ homes, Case said in an interview. “In my house I have a family of one of my priests staying with me. Five, six people, it changes every day.” The church’s school is now completely full with new students displaced by the storm.

“We’re at the max in class size,” Case says. “We ran out of book bags, and then received a donation of 150 book bags.

“We have enough to make payroll this month and the next,” Case says. “I don’t know what the long view is. We’re just doing it day by day.”

African American media have tracked the important role of the black church in hurricane relief efforts. But mainstream media are focusing not on the distribution of aid and federal funds, but on sensationalized stories of “wild gangs” and the “urban menace,” writes Dwight Cunningham in a report for the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a federation of more than 200 African-American newspapers. Meanwhile, “black households across the nation are dusting off spare rooms and sending Moneygrams to displaced family members,” Cunningham writes. “No doubt, people will need to be buried, yet there will be no money to bury them.”

For evacuee Tang Hui-Wen, who worked in the kitchen of a casino in New Orleans and has temporarily relocated to San Francisco, local community organizations have been more helpful than the federal government so far. According to the Singtao Daily, a Hong Kong-based Chinese-language newspaper that followed Tang’s story, after negotiating a maze of aid and vocational agencies Tang has found hotel housing through the Red Cross for only 14 days. He’s scrambling to find a job in that time.

“Some help is better than nothing,” Tang told the paper.

Hispanic media are also watching the ripple effects of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Rumbo, a Spanish-language newspaper chain based in San Antonio, Texas, reports that one Texas school district gained 110 students in a single day. “It remains unclear who will cover costs for the students,” the paper writes. “Local officials say they are not taking costs into account for the time being.”

Despite the stresses on aid providers and storm evacuees, both helpers and survivors are persevering, ethnic media reports. Vietnamese activist Lynagh, who says she was inspired by the dedication of Red Cross workers, says, “The Vietnamese people are so resilient. We were in a war. We were refugees before. We will rise again.” For the Rev. Lowell Case in Baton Rouge, it’s simple. “I know that Providence will provide,” he says.

Berkeley officials opted Friday not to close Iceland and instead ordered the 65-year-old rink to hire an acoustical engineer to quiet its yet-to-be installed temporary refrigeration system.

The city is scheduled to meet with Iceland and the engineer on Thursday to determine whether the rink, at Milvia and Ward streets, can quiet the system enough to install it in a residential neighborhood.

In July, Berkeley officials demanded that Iceland install the temporary system because the permanent refrigeration system lacks key safety devices and holds too much ammonia for firefighters to control in the event of a major leak.

Iceland’s deadline to install the temporary system expired Friday, but Assistant Fire Chief Gil Dong said Berkeley would not close the rink at least until after Iceland’s acoustical engineer issues a report scheduled for release on Wednesday.

Dong said the city rejected Iceland’s proposal to build a custom-made sound barrier for the system that would take four months to complete.

“They need to find something quicker to make sound reduction work,” he said.

Iceland General Manager Jay Wescott said the rink didn’t know of any quieter temporary cooling machines on the market.

“We’re trying to see how quickly we can come up with a remedy,” he added. “We just don’t want to put it out here and keep our neighbors awake at night.”

The temporary refrigeration system is planned for the rink’s parking lot, across from a condominium complex on Ward Street.

Berkeley’s noise ordinance prohibits ambient noise above 45 decibels in residential neighborhoods. Dong said that the latest tests showed the temporary system would produce 70 decibels of noise at property line for the condominium owners.

Dong added that if Iceland fails to quiet the temporary system, the City Council could choose to issue the rink a variance to operate above the statutory noise limit.

It’s time now to oppose the global warming theory with the “intelligent weather” theory. This is the notion that the recent weather disturbances can only be caused and explained by the intervention of a higher, all-knowing power. The idea that WE could cause global warming is absurd. Something of this magnitude can only be the work of an higher intelligence.

Robert Blau

•

HARRIET MIERS

Editors, Daily Planet:

The Harriet Miers nomination is an out-and-out sham. I urge all members of the Judiciary Committee and the Senate to reject this obvious handmaid for George Bush.

Joan Levinson

•

THE NOMINEE

Editors, Daily Planet:

I remember when Roman Hruska defended Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominee, Harold Carswell, by saying: “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”

Carswell and Hruska were laughed off the stage.

Will modern Democrats gather the nerve to reject this new, farcical nomination, or will mediocre cronies finally become the majority on the Supreme Court?

Dale Sophiea

•

TRUTH

Editors, Daily Planet:

Though not yet at the Bush-lie-and-thousands-die level, you have to admit Berkeley is pretty looth with the truth these days.

Did it all start with “Not a Through Street” signs on streets that do go through? The barricade-produced dogleg, Parker-Piedmont-Derby route, between Warring and College, has long been so signed.

Then, this January, el Gran Alcalde de Berkeley signed a resolution saying, “Whereas, Marin Avenue is a residential street on which 85 percent of vehicles currently travel more than 10 mph over the posted speed limit of 25 mph;...,” a document still online at: www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/resos/2005/62796.pdf . This clause appears carefully transported, by Berkeley’s Office of Transportation, from Korve Engineering’s “Traffic Plan for the City of Albany” (2000), wherein this mind-warp derived from data claiming only that the 85th percentile speed on Marin was around 36 mph (only 15 percent over 25 mph).

And then we question just what “daily” means in the masthead of the Berkeley-based medium by which this message of enlightenment has reached you ... a paper observed in mint condition only on Tuesdays and Fridays. We all now know that a couple of exosolar planets have recently been found which rotate so slowly and orbit their star so quickly that they experience less than four days in their years. Certainly the Daily Planet would find any residents of these (very hot) worlds to be very lucrative game.

Raymond A. Chamberlin

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BEER AND HONDAS

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was surprised to learn that at a recent UC Berkeley tailgate party, the university allowed various vendors to give out free alcoholic beverages to all those who attended, both young and old. I was particularly troubled that an automobile dealership, Berkeley Honda, seized the opportunity and was giving out drinks to young people without asking for proof of age. As an automobile dealer, Berkeley Honda must certainly be aware that driving under the influence of alcohol is dangerous, and a leading cause of death among young people.

Clearly, Berkeley Hon-da’s management had only one interest, to create community goodwill and thereby enhance its business. Berkeley Honda certainly has a right to market its product. But there are many positive ways of accomplishing that without jeopardizing people’s safety.

Karen Weinstein

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MOTHER EARTH

Editors, Daily Planet:

Look at this time of planetary disturbances and natural disasters as a way earth is cleaning herself of excesses and diseases. Bird flu, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, are Mother Nature’s way of telling inhabitants to clean up their act—clean up the mess they’ve created over time.

We’ve all seen of earth from space and know the planet is very much alive, in motion and vibrant. Mother Earth has ways of cleansing herself of pollution and overuse. Humans have their ways of shaking off colds, diseases and excesses. As above, so below.

Ron Lowe

Nevada City

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GARDENS

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was very happy to see the article about my very own University Village community garden in the Daily Planet. My husband and I live in the old Section A housing, and have two plots in the garden. So far we have grown heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, sun flowers, mint, oregano, basil, taro, peas, beans, sweet potatoes, zucchini, squash, strawberries, lavender, cilantro, cosmos, bell peppers, habeneros, corn, arugula, lettuce, beets, spinach, green onions, columbine, tea trees and snapdragons. And our small plots are relatively unproductive. Over our growing seasons here, we have produced maybe a modest 50 pounds of tasty organic fruits and veggies. Our neighboring gardeners, however, have produced hundreds and hundreds of pounds in their more diligently kept garden plots. One point that I think the article did not emphasize enough was the fact that these plots are a necessary source of food for many of the gardeners. And that losing access to these plots for a few years, or forever, if they are simply paved over, will rob these gardeners of a valuable asset, and cost them hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, in additional food costs. The 32 foot encroachment for head-in parking is ridiculous. No car is 32 feet long. This paved swatch over the best, oldest, and most beautiful plots (including a pond, arbors, and fruit trees) is symbolic of the disdain the UC Regents have for UCB families. In Berkeley, if anywhere, the garden community should be protected and upheld as an example to other universities. The garden symbolizes the growth and success of a racially, nationally, and economically diverse community, in a creative, productive and organic environment. If the garden is paved, it will symbolize the homogenizing of UC Berkeley. Faceless, yardless, expensive high density housing on the train tracks will replace the open spaces and human creativity now so evident.

Rebecca Davis Stevenson

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BLAMING THE VICTIM

Editors, Daily Planet:

P. M. Price’s column regarding Meleia Willis-Starbuck may be sincerely heartfelt, but it completely misfires with statements like “I hope that the politicians, community activists, university officials and other dignitaries, who praised Meleia so ardently for her short life’s full work, do not allow her memory to be tarnished for any reason. No reason would be good enough.” Price couldn’t be more wrong.

What I will remember more than anything about Ms. Willis-Starbuck is that she chose to engage in a verbal altercation on the street when she could have gotten into a car with friends and driven away; that she chose to call another friend to bring a gun into the situation, an action so irresponsible as to defy belief when coming from an Ivy League student; and that her friend fired recklessly into a crowd of people, killing Meleia. I will remember that this girl’s stupidity, bad judgment and lousy choice of friends caused her own death. All the Dartmouths and Berkeley-chic trips to Cuba in the world cannot erase that tragic fact.

Michael Stephens

Chicago

•

TREES

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was delighted to read the article titled “UC: Trees Cause Homelessness” in the Oct 4-6 edition of the Pepper Spray Times because I just encountered a similar case of twisted tree thinking last week. When City of Berkeley employees showed up to work on a tree on my block, I asked why they were trimming it. They explained that drivers were not stopping at the stop sign. To connect the drivers’ actions to the tree seemed odd because the foliage didn’t actually obscure the stop sign. In addition, now that the tree has been trimmed into a silly-looking pompom, the drivers still just roll on through. Seems like no matter what the problem is, both the University and the City think the proper response is to reduce the plant life. I guess it makes them feel like they are doing something positive. But, in fact, all they are doing is reducing the livability of this urban environment.

Sally Levinson

•

DISATER PLANNING

Editors, Daily Planet:

Ms. O’Malley’s editorial on disaster planning raises interesting questions on the relative roles of the federal government and of voluntary associations in disaster situations. It’s curious that she chooses Cuba as the shining example of how to do it right.

I’m a Red Cross disaster volunteer who was traveling in China when Katrina struck and who happened to see a TV interview with a representative of the Chinese Red Cross. He expressed great dissatisfaction with the apparent lack of effective response in the U.S., and said that “in China it’s a lot easier: when we have a big flood we just call the People’s Liberation Army, and they send 100,000 troops right away.” People are, however, not “moved out of harm’s way” in China, because a flood on the Yellow River strikes specific areas without sufficient predictability—it’s a levee issue there as well. Instead Chinese flood victims are evacuated after the fact with no provision for saving their belongings, housed temporarily en masse, and then generally left to return and rebuild on their own.

A tiny country like Cuba, whose natural disasters come with days of warning to predictable locales, may be able to work proactively. But China—equally endowed with a dominant federal “regime”—is almost never able to do anything but react. The scale of natural events can always easily overwhelm the scale of government preparation and response, no matter how centrally planned for and no matter how many troops are on call.

I join Ms. O’Malley in not blindly accepting as an excuse the claim that “the Bush regime just doesn’t like the federal government,” even though that’s conservative dogma. An adventurous and ideological administration without apparent regard for fiscal responsibility is perfectly capable of using the federal government for big local interventions, not all of which would be welcome.

Our own “patchwork of voluntary organizations” such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army may not have the organizational simplicity of the People’s Liberation Army. The Red Cross has so far sent “only” 25,000 volunteers to the recent hurricane zones, and that has taken weeks to arrange. But such “people’s liberation organizations,” to coin a phrase, don’t create the dangerous precedent of massive federal-troop intervention in our daily life. With precedents in place via disaster response, how big a step would it be to find an “emergency needing federal troops” in the next large and unruly national political demonstration? Remember that the Chinese government also called in the PLA to “assist” with that unplanned 1989 political “disaster” in Tienanmen Square. We’re a long way from that here, thankfully, but let’s think long and hard before we open such a door even for compelling disaster needs.

Voluntary disaster responders don’t pack any political agenda and bring no ideological goals to a disaster zone. Why do we need to go any farther than making sure their organizations are well supported for the tasks they take on so fearlessly and collectively perform so well?

Alan Tobey

•

WILLIAM BENNETT

Editors, Daily Planet:

Mr. Allen-Taylor makes an argument that I don’t find persuasive against the notion that the subject remarks were racist. I indeed believe them to be, and also believe a more compelling argument can be made that they are than that they are not. That said, however, should it be desirable to seek alternative labels to the racist one, perhaps we should consider eugenicist. Eugenics, the closeted pseudo-science, more fashionable in the period 1925-1980 than today, would embrace heartily Mr. Bennett’s notion of a crime-rate improvement to be achieved through black abortion, or sterilization for that matter. Eugenicists had and have as a stated aim the denial of progeny to those deemed undesirable, and clearly the implication is that this race prone to crime and violence beyond their numerical share would qualify as such.

As one of their number, having experienced rather than having perpetrated crime, I take issue with his conclusion. Back in 1969, when then not yet President George Herbert Walker Bush hosted a discussion on what to do about the increased birth rate of black babies, and introduced two leading eugenicists to opine on the matter, hardly a brow was raised in surprise. Certainly there was no drumbeat of outrage. Surely we cannot be taken aback that his former drug czar would share concerns about black babies. To the credit of both, the birth rate is no longer a runaway problem. Whether openly or covertly, the relative population of African descent has been and is being managed downward.

If Mr. Allen-Taylor sees this in a non-racist context, I won’t chose to argue the semantics. It is noteworthy, however, to observe and understand the larger issue; thus eugenics is much more meaningfully explored than racism in this instance.

Tony Jennings

•

CONFUSED

Editors, Daily Planet:

An important fact is missing in J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s excellent thesis on Bill Bennett and racism. If every American of any color or culture was offered free education beyond high school; if offered the ability to pursue any desired vocation or knowledge, we would not only reduce crime, and the wasting of vital funds on punishment, we would certainly reduce the number of confused citizens like Bill Bennett.

Gerta Farber

•

MORE ON BENNETT

Editors, Daily Planet:

I must take issue with J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s reflections on William Bennett on two grounds:

First, Mr. Allen-Taylor defames our language by saying we lack appropriate words to describe Bennett’s comments. Yet he contradicts himself in the same article by finding perfectly fine words: “stupid”, “self-righteous” and “wrong” are excellent choices. Drawing from Allen-Taylor’s response, we could add “irresponsible” and “inciting.” There’s no need to tar the English language, Mr. Allen-Taylor.

Second, Mr. Allen-Taylor doesn’t fight back hard enough against the unquestioned premise that blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes. Yes, it sure at least looks like law enforcement is applied unevenly and so we SHOULD, as Allen-Taylor suggests, wonder what the actual rates of crime COMMISSION are. And, yes, we ought to have an economic suspicion that if any group is removed from the scene, the economic niche for crimes associated with that group may very well be filled by other groups—an entire mode of essentialist political theory (that some groups have, in their essence or even culture, a unique propensity to generate a particular class of social phenomenon (good or ill, criminal or civil)) was forcibly put down in World War II and has been philosophically and scientifically torn to shreds by thinkers from Socrates onward. But in this particular case, the crime rate in America and its racial correlations, one can go much further:

My understanding is that there is plenty of research which claims to show that once one compares apples to apples, controlling for factors such as economic status and location, a great deal of the correlations between race and crime rate disappear. Whether that research is ultimately correct or not, it points up that glib assertions about race and crime-rate correlation are less right or wrong so much as they are MEANINGLESS in any scientific sense. That such glib assertions are (all too) MEANINGFUL in shaping public opinion makes their uncritical repetition by public figures like Bennett outright immoral.

So, Mr. Allen-Taylor, there is one more word for your list to describe the author of The Book of Virtues on the occasion of this latest gaffe: “hypocrite.”

Thomas Lord

•

NO ACCIDENT

Editors, Daily Planet:

I wish I could totally agree with J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s assessment of Bill Bennett. While it is impossible to prove he is a racist, I am afraid we cannot dismiss him as stupid either. The words I would use to describe Bill Bennett are shrewd, cynical, and desperate.

It is no accident Bennett used blacks in his abortion example. He could have said aborting all Italian-American fetuses would reduce crime because there would be no one to join the Mafia. He could have said that aborting the fetuses of those in the lowest economic classes would reduce crime. He could then go on to say how ridiculous and morally offensive it is to argue those positions. He could have used those examples to make his point, but he didn’t. He knew that the resulting publicity would bring curious listeners to his show. It didn’t matter to him if what he was saying was factually wrong. All he had to do was word his statement in a way that he could later deny any racist intent.

With the current glut of conservative talk shows, latecomers to the game are having trouble getting an audience. Bennett’s show is one that is struggling. He is syndicated on 115 stations according to Salem Radio’s web site. In comparison, Michael Medved, another host syndicated by Salem, is heard on 180. Michael Reagan, syndicated by Radio America, is heard on over 200 stations. Rush Limbaugh’s show on Premiere Radio Networks has 650.

Making a racially charged comment on the air may get Bennett the listeners he desperately seeks. Then again, it may give Salem an excuse to pull the plug on an underperforming show. If he loses his show now, he will blame the Left for silencing him. Any campaign to cancel him would give Bennett exactly want he wants. Without that campaign, his show would soon die from a lack of audience, leaving him with no one to blame but himself.

Tom Yamaguchi

•

JIMI HENDRIX

Editors, Daily Planet:

I agree with Winston Burton that erecting a Jimi Hendrix statue would be an excellent idea, but please place the statue on a busy corner so that we can all admire it daily, instead of needing to veer off to a side street.

No doubt a local Jimi Hendrix museum would go over well too. It would draw tourists, and probably just needs to permission of his estate to be opened. Giving the profits to local school music programs is a great idea.

I became a Hendrix fan at age 11, my parents would not allow me to see him at the Hollywood Bowl (where he opened for the Monkees), and he died when I was 14. My friends know that I want Voodoo Chile (slight return) played at my funeral, and I had it played by the band at my wedding.

I’ll start the offer with $200 towards building a Jimi Hendrix statue here in Berkeley.

Will the city help by finding and donating a nice place?

Robert Berend

Kensington

•

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Editors, Daily Planet:

As I read the story of Berkeley’s newest hero/future obstetrician, I couldn’t help but hear Deep Throat’s cryptic words somewhere in my head, “follow the money.” Three children in intensive care until December? At public expense? For a mother who doesn’t have custody of her other three children? Who does have a social worker? I’m confused. To compound my confusion, I didn’t see any mention of the new father in the report. Couldn’t these hundreds of thousands of public dollars been spent to benefit more of our precious children?

Neal Rockett

P.S. Before anyone screams about cultural insensitivity, I have sent this letter independent of the creed, color, sexual preference, race or ethnicity of all participants.

•

THANKS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Mr. Biko Eisen-Martin, this is Linda Smith. I don’t know you, but I want to say thank you for helping a new mother in need. You are obviously a Human Angel-On-Call. (According to this book on Angels, an “Angel-On-Call” is any human being who shows up “by chance” to be of service to someone else in need. I know that there are special Coincidence Arranging Angels who arrange for people to run into each other “by chance” and then one ends up aiding the other. These are the same Angels who arrange for future lovers or very good friends to meet, or for people who long to see each other again but who don’t have a phone number, email, or contact information to help arrange that. And then one day, boom! You run into the person whom you ached to meet again, but thought you never would. This has happened to me a lot in recent times).

I’m amazed that more people didn’t stop to notice: “Hey, there’s a woman bleeding on the steps of BART, in a very crowded area of Downtown Berkeley! Hello?!?! Somebody help her!” Thank God for Biko, who did.

Why don’t Americans notice people and things more? What is it about a car-and work-and home/family centered society, that makes us frequently not notice things like buckeye butterflies or people on the streets or a beautiful display of fresh-cut flowers? I pray and hope that everyone begins to pray and meditate more. Part of prayer is taking appropriate action as you are led by your indwelling God or Wisdom. Another form of prayer or spiritual work, is noticing what needs to be done to make the world a better place, and then doing something, big or small, to help that.

We all have talents, passions, strengths, things we love to do for fun or work. Fun and work and world service should be synonymous, don’t you think?

Noticing people or things, taking time to slow down, is a choice. And, a good one!

Linda M. Smith

P.S. Somebody finally noticed me the other day enjoying all the trees and butterflies and such. I took time to just “magickally listen” to him. Now I’ve made a new friend. I’ve bumped into him twice, “by chance.” A “coincidence” is just a polite term for “a miracle.” Miracles are all around us. We can choose to notice them. It may or may not be anything spectacular, like mental telepathy or instant healing of cancer or a broken limb. Miracles come in all sizes. That black mother had three miracles the other day. Thanks also to the people who transported her to the hospital, and the ones who helped birth and care for her three kids. Thanks to the person who loaned Biko a cell phone to call the ambulance.

•

UNEXPECTED DELIVERY

Editors, Daily Planet:

Your reporter, perhaps blinded by the need for political correctness, has missed a number of critical points in his coverage of the birth of triplets

to a woman at the Berkeley BART station.

Unanswered questions include: Where is the father of the children? Why are her other three children not in her custody? Why is this woman, who is apparently homeless, jobless and on welfare, having more children?

Perhaps you don’t want to invade the women’s privacy by asking any hard questions, but don’t you think that the public, who are now, in ‘loco parentis,’ picking up the bill to house and feed these children, deserve some answers?

R. Eisenman

•

A FEW THOUGHTS

Editors, Daily Planet:

The Berkeley City government by its policies expresses its view that my life is a thing of no value and entirely dispensable as collateral damage, not in a war on foreign soil, against which its members would hypocritically protest, but in the class war between landlords and landowners versus tenants. The government expresses the view that property owners must have carte blanche to do as they please on private property, especially with respect to renovation and development, regardless of the damage to the comfort, health, and life of “lesser” members of the community, such as myself. The Berkeley Municipal Code does not support the government in its view. To maintain its inhumane and fascistic view, the government must substitute its own supposedly arcane and ostensibly nonsensical interpretation of the intent of local law for the plain word meaning of the ordinances. It claims that the courts have ruled in its favor, but it will not make those rulings available to the public. They are not otherwise accessible, since they were only trial court rulings, at best, and never reached the appellate level where they would become published opinions that would truly set precedent. They force citizens to challenge them in the courts and are confident of getting bad rulings from the court to bolster their nonsensical and fascistic interpretations of local ordinances. They are swaggering bullies, who have no compunction about bullying citizens such as myself to death. If they insist, I will challenge them in the courts, even though the odds are stacked against me and even though I am trying against all odds to recover from almost certainly terminal cancer. I hope I will at least demonstrate to all good citizens left in the City of Berkeley what they must do to overthrow the monster that has overtaken our City—we must fight against all odds and never say die—we must love not our own lives unto death—we must die for the cause of liberty and justice if need be. This is the Way of Christ, the way that so-called “progressives” who have now flip-flopped over into fascists will never know.

Peter Mutnick

•

OAKLAND SCHOOL

FOR THE ARTS

Editors, Daily Planet:

I am a parent of a child who is in his second year of Oakland School for the Arts. I was quite appalled by the unbalanced article written by J. Doulas Allen Taylor in the Sept. 2-5 Daily Planet entitled “Turmoil in Oakland School for the Arts, Parents Say.” The vast majority of your full-page article was focused on the experience of one disgruntled child who was at OSA less than a semester.

I want to say that my son Daniel has had a vastly different experience of OSA, and many other students there have had a very positive experience. Your article stated “the humanities classes were “so disorganized that differnet classes were taught during the year by a French teacher, a Spanish teacher, an English teacher and a Visual Arts Teacher.” In my child’s case, his humanities course was taught by Dr. Zachary Polsky, a teacher with a BA from Grinnel College and a PhD from the University of California at Davis. Dr. Polsky was certainly more than capable of teaching both French and Humanities. His Humanities course was delightful. My son was reading Plato’s “allegory of the Cave” from the “Republic,” excerpts from the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” the poetry of Lesbos. He read the play “Lysistrata,” and wrote a report comparing the ecstatic sculpture and art of ancient Indian Civilizations to the religious art of the mideaval European period. His teachers were excellent, stimulating, and had fine academic preparation. In addition to Dr. Polsky, his science teacher Adelaid Cheng hails from UC Berkeley; his music teacher Mr. Aton, trained at Chicago State University and New England Conservatory of Music; his English teacher Mr. Przyborowski was from San Francisco State University; his Math Teacher Mr. Taylor, trained at Swartmore College and the London School of Economics. Other outstanding faculty my son associated with were Mr. Keyes, the head of the Visual Arts Department who has a BFA from the Chicago Art Institute and an MFA from Yale University; Reginald Savage who is the artistic director for Savage Jazz Dance Company; Penelope Thomas with a BA from Rice University and an MA from the University of California at Santa Cruz; Josy Miller from Barnard College of Columbia University; Andrey Tarnarutskiy from Moscow Polytechnical Univeristy, Shchukin Theatre College in Moscow and an MA from New York Univerity; and Cava Menzies from the Berklee School of Music. All of these teachers have returned this year; and have been supplemented by some fine new teachers. My son has found his guitar teacher Omid Zoufonoun (University of Southern California, who was also classically trained in music in Vienna) to be absolutely outstanding. He considers Osceola Free, an English teacher from Southern University”totally inspirational,” and Hani Aldhafari, his math teacher from the University of California at Berkeley smart and “cool.”

I have been impressed by the small class sizes (he has no more than 18-20 students in each of his academic classes); the individualized attention he receives from both teachers and administrative staff; and the cultural diversity of the faculty. My son’s artistic emphasis is instrumental music. He gets 5 hours a day of varied musical instruction 4 days a week, and 3 hours of instruction in music related activities on Wednesdays. He is learning the technical aspects of performing and recording music through faculty from Expressions College in Emeryville. I could never afford to pay for this high level of musical training in the community.

As a new school, OSA has not been without its growing pains and there was indeed been some teacher turnover last year. However, the overwhelming majority of my son’s teachers have returned. While your reporter Mr. Allen-Taylor dedicated 4 columns of his article to Lydia Kosmos and her mother’s complaints about OSA; he relegated his single positive comment about the school to a single line buried at the end of paragraph 5 when he wrote “OSA is ranked in the top 10 percentile in the Academic Performance Index, California’s official scorecard for rating its grade schools.” Last year OSA scored 9 of 10 on the Statewide Academic Performance Index. The next closest Oakland High School, Skyline High, scored 3 of 10 and all of the other Oakland High Schools scored 1 of 10. When the API scores for OSA were adjusted for socio-economic status , the school scored 10 of 10. This outstanding academic achievement was well documented by both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune. I would hope that Mr. Allen-Taylor would spend some time investigating and writing a balanced report on OSA. Why not spend some time interviewing the kids who love the school? To do otherwise causes me to assume that your reporter has a biased agenda.

“No more compromises,” vowed Mayor Bates during a break in the council’s Sept. 27 deliberations. The mayor had just joined councilmembers Capitelli, Maio, Moore, Olds and Wozniak in a 6-3 vote approving a “public participation program” for the Downtown Area Plan (DAP).

The plan (but not the program) was mandated by the council’s secret settlement of its lawsuit against UC last May. In response to concerns about community representation, the mayor’s ostensible compromise was to add three planning commissioners, to be chosen by the Planning Commission, to an 18-member citizens advisory group to be chosen by the mayor and the council (two appointees apiece).

Some compromise. The only way to ensure adequate representation of the many constituencies with a direct interest in downtown—residents, businesspeople, arts groups, environmentalists, preservationists, students, transportation activists, among others—would have been to create an advisory group composed of those constituencies’ representatives. Instead, the council approved a task force consisting entirely of council appointees.

Council appointees, who include all non-elected city commissioners, reflect the interests of the mayor and individual councilmembers who appoint them, not stakeholder constituencies. Of course, some councilmembers are likely to choose representatives of stakeholder groups. But the ad hoc appointment procedure already underway, in which each councilmember independently chooses her or his two appointees, makes it unlikely that all deserving groups will be represented.

The snubbing of the community was no oversight. The council rejected a proposal from the Transportation Commission to set up a DAP advisory group modeled on the admirable 2004 UC Hotel/Conference Center Task Force, which included representatives of all major downtown stakeholder groups. The members of that task force were chosen by a subcommittee of the planning commission, which also oversaw the task force’s work. This format, dubbed the stakeholder model, was also endorsed in letters from the Sierra Club, the Le Conte Neighborhood Association and MAAGNA (McKinleyAddisonAllstonGrant Neighborhood Association) and in public comments made at the meeting by Jesse Arreguin, director of city affairs for the Associated Students of the University of California and by others, including myself.

The stakeholder model didn’t go down without a fight. Councilmember Spring made a motion, seconded by Councilmember Anderson, to refer the stakeholder model back to the planning commission and to seek the commission’s recommendation on a format for the DAP citizens advisory group. The council, said Anderson, should honor “the statutory role of the planning commission” and the historically “unique … level of citizen participation” in Berkeley municipal affairs. Right on.

The arguments marshaled against Spring’s motion and the stakeholder model were disingenuous. Councilmember Maio said that, given its heavy workload, the Planning Commission wouldn’t have time to oversee the DAP process. In reply, Councilmember Worthington stated, all too accurately, that a list of the Planning Commission’s upcoming projects was as relevant to the issue at hand as a list of what he’d eaten that day. The Planning Commission, he observed, wasn’t being ask to run the DAP advisory group but rather to choose its format at the commission’s meeting the very next evening. (He might have added the matter was already listed on the commission’s Sept. 28 agenda.) Worthington was ignored by the council majority.

From the staff side, Planning Director Dan Marks contended that an advisory group larger than 20 (15 was his ideal) would be unmanageable. What he meant, I surmise, is that staff would be unable to control such a group, which instead would be run by its citizen personnel. In an inexcusable omission, Marks failed to remind the council that every previous area plan—West Berkeley, South Berkeley, Southside (currently in draft), and Downtown—was put together by a stakeholder group consisting of 27 or more members.

Mayor Bates’ major contribution to the spinfest took the form of an op-ed that appeared in the Daily Planet the morning of the meeting. Under the title “Getting to Work on Our Downtown Plan,” the mayor wrote: “[W]e will start by creating a community-led task force.” Less than 24 hours after his essay hit the streets, the council, acting at the mayor’s behest, created the mayor-and-council-led task force described above.

On second thought, make that the mayor-led task force. The Downtown Area Plan is Tom Bates’ baby; the idea for it came from him, not the university. Another notable feature of the DAP task force, left unmentioned in both the mayor’s op-ed and the council’s discussion, is that the DAP advisory group’s chair is to be chosen by Mayor Bates.

That provision appears to violate city protocol and law. The resolution prepared by staff and approved by the council on Sept. 27 states that the DAP advisory group is to be “a temporary City of Berkeley commission.” It also states that “the DPAC [Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee] shall operate under the rules set forth in the City Council's resolutions for Commissions and the City Commissioner's Handbook.”

According to the City of Berkeley Commissioner’s Manual, each city commission is to elect its own chair and vice chair, “unless otherwise provided by ordinance.” The council’s Sept. 27 resolution was not an ordinance. So what law or even mere precedent authorizes the mayoral selection of this (temporary) commission’s chair? Apparently nothing. But what else is new in the Bates mayoralty?

As the saying goes: you can put earrings on a pig, but it’s still a pig. For all the blather about community, the fact is that the DAP resolution approved by the council majority broke the public trust. But it’s only part of the larger betrayal that the council perpetrated when it dropped the city’s lawsuit over the UC administration’s Long Range Development Plan, which projects over 1.2 million square feet of off-campus development and at least 1,000 new off-campus parking spaces.

The “lack of community control over university growth,” wrote Mayor Bates in his op-ed, “was the single most important reason we filed a lawsuit to stop implementation of their LRDP [Long Range Development Plan].” He got that one right. But if the mayor and his allies were really committed to community control, they would have pressed the city’s suit all the way to court.

Most of the debate about the city’s settlement with the UC administration has concerned university development off the campus proper, and in downtown in particular. What the settlement agreement doesn’t say but what has become apparent is that one purpose of the DAP is to accommodate private development in downtown that would be illegal under the city’s existing Downtown Plan and zoning law.

Consider the telling slip in Mayor Bates’ op-ed: “[S]ome community members,” wrote the mayor, “have wondered what is wrong with the city’s existing downtown plan. The current downtown will be used as a starting point for the new plan. However, it was developed over 15 years ago and is, in many cases, out of date.” Clearly, Mr. Bates meant to say that the current downtown plan will be used as the starting point for the new plan. The text he sent to the Daily Planet belies his true intentions, which are to legitimate the outsized, illegal developments that have already been approved by the council and expedited by city staff.

Once the new height and density standards are in place, citizens appealing the successors to the Gaia Building and the Seagate project will no longer have a legal leg to stand on. City staff are already citing the Gaia and Seagate structures as benchmarks for pending development (see pages 17 and 18 of the July 25 staff report to the council on the Brower Center/Oxford Plaza).

Meanwhile the DAP is being rolled out under the guise of a triumphant town and gown détente achieved through the wondrous ministrations of Mayor Bates.

I forgot my homework, but it wasn’t my fault. Getting ready to go to an MFA workshop at San Francisco State last week, I got distracted and left my assignment in the house. It wasn’t my fault because there was a lot going on at the very moment I needed to leave. I had to run in order to catch the #15 bus. I had to sprint up the MacArthur Station stairs to meet the Daly City-bound train. It was not until I’d caught my breath, somewhere between the 12th Street and West Oakland stations, that I realized my mistake.

I forgot my homework because Teddy and Eric were replacing the wheelchair ramp on the side of our house and just before departing for school I’d become totally engrossed in the merits of two-inch, $54-a-sheet, pressure-treated plywood.

“We need four more sheets,” Teddy had said, “so give me another $200.”

“I’m late for school,” I’d answered. “I’ll go to the ATM on campus and bring it home with me tonight.”

I forgot my homework because in addition to Teddy and Eric distracting me with thoughts of plywood and money, my neighbor Che was upstairs in my bedroom trying to fix my computer.

“I think the problem is with your software,” he’d said as I was rummaging through my papers, gathering up pens and notebooks. “It’s not the hardware. I’ve checked the connections, looked at the modem and the hubs, replaced some memory, and talked with several people in India.”

“Just keep working on it,” I’d said. “You don’t need to tell me what’s wrong because I don’t understand a thing about it and, frankly, I don’t want to. I’ve got to leave for school now. We’ll settle up when I get home.”

I went downstairs, but before I could escape, Andrea requested a quick loan, and Ralph asked me to move his arms and legs one more time. I pulled down the blankets covering him, rearranged his limbs, kissed him good-by, and fled.

After the initial shock of discovering I’d forgotten my homework, I needed to come up with a plan. What was I going to tell my professor, that I didn’t bring it because of Teddy, Eric, Che, Andrea, and Ralph? Because of 2-inch pressure-treated plywood, bad software, small loans, and arms and legs that needed rearranging?

I remembered there was a young man in my class who lived in the East Bay and sometimes gave me lifts home from school. If I could get in touch with him, maybe he could help with this homework crisis. I didn’t have his phone number, but I knew where he worked, and that his girlfriend worked there, too. I didn’t know her name, but, hell, I was desperate. I dialed information just before the train hurtled under the bay. I wasn’t able to reconnect until we came up for air after the Balboa Park stop. David wasn’t at work so I spoke with his girlfriend. I told her about my missing homework and asked for David’s cell phone number. She gave it to me, and then had second thoughts.

“Who are you again?” she asked. I re-explained, hung up, and called David. Could he bring me my homework if I had it delivered to him before he left for school? Yes, he said. He’d be at Café Rouge on 4th Street for the next half hour.

By now the train was at the Daly City station. I called my house as I ran down the steps and sprinted into the street to catch the shuttle bus. I asked Che to look for the forgotten assignment. Was it on my desk? Of course not. Downstairs on the dining room table? No. Had I left it outside while talking with Teddy and Eric? No. Was it mixed-up in the sheets and blankets on Ralph’s bed? Negative. In the bathroom, on the attic steps, in a trashcan?

Finally, Che found it underneath a library book. He promised to deliver my homework to David. I hung up the phone just as the bus reached campus.

As I got off the shuttle, several fellow commuters wished me luck with my assignment. I was no longer just another anonymous shuttle bus-riding co-ed. I was the old lady who had forgotten her homework.

I never intended to be a soccer mom. I am no sports fan, so my husband Mike and I agreed that he would be the athletic director for the kids. When our first son joined a team at age 6, I attended a token game or two. The division of labor fell apart as soon as our younger boy, Chris, started playing.

The two games were inevitably scheduled at the same time in different suburbs. As physicians, Mike and I had weekend call. Even with carpools we sometimes had to interrupt hospital rounds to run one child home or to the game. We planned Saturdays like a military campaign.

Chris’s first game was at 7:30 am. Fog-chilled and sleepy, I stood on a windy hill, grateful that my map reading skills had allowed me to find the obscure field. The boys warmed up and the dads (mostly dads came to the earliest games) debated the teams’ prospects. Somehow they knew the relative standings of these two groups of first and second graders.

I felt left out, as though there were a sports manual for parents that had circulated behind my back. I didn’t know the rules of the game and except for my boy, the only African-American on the team, I had a hard time distinguishing the towheaded boys milling about on the field.

When a dad spoke to me, I mentioned that it was tough to mobilize this early. He looked at me funny, and said that he thought of it as giving back to his children what his parents had done for him. I come from a family of girls, none of whom played team sports outside of school. My mother attended school programs and dance or piano recitals, indoors. I don’t remember my father at any event, school or extracurricular. By the time I had made it through one soccer season, I had paid back any parental debt.

That first year, I resented the obligations of soccer, especially since the boys preferred to have their dad on the sidelines. But after the tournament weekend (two games on Saturday, and at least one on Sunday, maybe two if they won) I resigned myself to my fate. Soccer was my life, love it or leave it. I stopped inviting people to dinner during the season because I was too tired. We rented videos to avoid getting in the car again Saturday night.

More important, I started to get to know the other parents. One mom was an infectious disease specialist, one a nationally known journalist. There were authors and computer experts and teachers. Every team had several lawyer dads, who provided acid commentary on the referee’s decisions. There was a hulking guy who could not tolerate any judgment that went against his kid. When he started to swear at the referee, the other dads would close around him softly, the way a sea anemone eats.

The mothers became my girlfriends. We slipped out to malls to shop between games. We traded gardening tips and discussed novels, before book groups became a fad. We took power walks while the kids were warming up. We faced puberty together. By high school, I knew these parents better than any others, and I was sorry when some of the kids (like our older boy) dropped out to pursue other sports. Chris went out for his high school soccer team, adding a winter season to his fall play.

I can pinpoint the moment that I knew I was a soccer mom. Chris was a teenager, and we parents were watching an under eight game while we waited for our field to open up. Someone asked why the referee didn’t call “offsides” on the last play. A voice emerged from me and said, “They don’t call offsides in under eights.” I felt like a ventriloquist. Where did that knowledge, that voice come from? I wanted to look in the mirror, to make sure that I was still me.

At the high school, there were games during the week, too. I can’t say that we attended every one. We had to work, after all. But it gradually dawned on me that my son was a star. Not as much of a star as the kid on his team who played for the national team. But enough to be voted all-county defender in his senior year. He received the varsity Most Inspirational and Scholar-Athlete awards at school. The coach remembered him studying AP chemistry on the bus.

Some parents sustain themselves over the years by hoping that soccer will ease their child’s way into college, or pay for his education. When Chris applied, he listed soccer among his accomplishments, but he wouldn’t let us lobby the coach, standard operating procedure in today’s college admission frenzy. He wanted the option not to play. He was admitted to his first choice of college, so I believe now that he made a mature decision. At the time I wasn’t so sure.

Twelve years and hundreds of games later, my days on the sidelines are over. There was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and Chris’s 15 minutes of soccer fame are past. All I can say is that it was a privilege to be there.?

LOS ANGELES—Since the day my kids were born, my mantra has been, “Go to college.” But next week marks not only my daughter’s graduation from boot camp, but the Oct. 15 deadline for my son to opt out of the military recruitment directory at his school.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) makes school administrators responsible for delivering the personal information of high school students to the military for their recruitment efforts. While NCLB provides an “opt-out” alternative, it places the responsibility for opting out on students and parents. But many do not even know about the NCLB. In other cases, students who have opted-out have mistakenly had their information removed from honor roll and college recruiters lists.

For my mixed Mexican-American/African-American family, military service is the GED of career plans. The military is Plan B, when you haven’t had enough success in high school to go directly to a four-year college. It is not that I do not believe in patriotic duty. Latinos in particular have a proven history of military service, with more Congressional Medals of Honor winners than any other minority. I teach my kids we all have a responsibility to serve the common good. But I also tell them that there are many ways to participate in public service.

When my daughter entered high school four years ago, the military option was toward the bottom of the list. She has always been a bright kid with decent grades. She demonstrated natural leadership skills in her business club, but was often recognized more for her good looks, which seemed to embarrass this shy girl. She chose to live with her father, who worked an afternoon shift, leaving her to an empty house after school and little motivation to get on the college track. She became a prime target for military recruiters, who offered her some sense of family and praised her leadership ability instead of her beauty.

As Harvard, Princeton and Yale slipped away and UCLA and USC became a pipe dream, I tried to steer her toward the Cal State system and community colleges. When my daughter showed little interest in any college, I pointed her toward community service, like the Peace Corps. But I was no match for military recruiters. They were calling three times a week, taking her to lunch, promising her independence and a way out of her small desert town, as well as a way to help her “poverty-ridden” single mother in East L.A., who still had two other kids to raise. They even gave her “scholarship” money, complete with a giant check presented at a luncheon as if she had won the lotto (to be cashed when she completed boot camp.)

When she finally surprised me by signing her paperwork to join the Army (her Mother’s Day “gift” to me), I almost wished instead that she had come to tell me she was pregnant. She tried to console me by showing me her GI Bill benefits, which will give her money for college after she completes her five years of service. But I know of Veterans Administration statistics that show only 5 percent of military personnel receive the maximum education benefit.

I will continue to support my daughter, but I felt her intelligence, grace and compassion were better suited outside the military. Plan B is not something any mother wants for her child.

I hope the two boys I still have at home will choose a different path. But statistics show that because my high-school son goes to a predominately minority school, he is four times more likely to enroll in a Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) class than if he attended a predominately white school. And because his school is considered low-income, he is four times more likely to be offered a JRTOC class in the first place. JROTC classes are a powerful recruitment tool for the military.

According to the American Friends Service Committee, the JROTC has approximately 310,000 students enrolled in programs in 2,200 schools across the nation. Many schools are offering JROTC as an alternative to overcrowded PE classes that often enroll more than 70 students. Many schools have standards so low they look upon the military as the best a poor kid of color can do to get out of the hood. Often, they steer students toward the military instead of enrolling them in a college prep class—playing God with our children’s futures.

My daughter graduates boot camp next week, while my son will be opting out of giving his information to the military. He has already decided he is going to apply to the University of Maryland and UCLA. His English teacher (an attorney for 20 years before he became a teacher) has told him he would make a good lawyer. I think he would make an even better senator.

My daughter is headed to six months of training in Arizona after she graduates boot camp. Just a month after her 19th birthday, the Army can do with her what they please, including sending her to Iraq. In the meantime, what is a mother to do but worry and pray and for the future of her children?

Christine Senteno is a single mother from East Los Angeles who works full-time and attends East Los Angeles College part-time. She wrote this article for YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia, a journal of young life in the Bay Area. ?

Energized by Camp Casey and the creativity of Cindy Sheehan, a change is taking place in the peace movement.

Two events took pace in Oakland recently, reflecting a shift in focus from electoral pressure politics to direct mass action. On Sept. 23, hundreds of demonstrators, organized by Courage To Resist, Not In Our Name and other organizations, shut down the Oakland Military Recruiting Center. Graffiti across the front of the building said: “A better world is possible.” The activists took over a Chevron Station in downtown Oakland, and students from Skyline High, Oakland Tech, and McClymonds High chanted “The power of the people is now.” One demonstrator said that creative tactics and improvisation, a people power strategy, can halt the occupation of Iraq. “ We don’t need to rely on intermediaries to make change. We ourselves are the agents of peace and democracy.”

On Oct. 6, Cindy Sheehan returned home to the Bay Area. The Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland overflowed with cheering supporters. Introduced by Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange and Code Pink, Cindy described the growing power of the democratic peace movement. “America is coming out,” she said. “We the people have the power. Camp Casey was a place of love, of hope and acceptance. Every need was fulfilled. Everyone did a job joyfully. Two couples were inspired to get married at Camp Casey.” While the Camp Casey story ran in the media, its profound significance has yet to be understood. Camp Casey represents the power of direct democracy—where strangers become friends, where everyone extends a helping hand in the euphoria of real human community. “A while back,” said Ms. Sheehan, “it did not seem like anything was working. The peace movement was there, but we did not know what to do. Now Americans are ready.”

Cindy Sheehan recently met with the unresponsive, pro-war Senator John McCain in Phoenix, Arizona. In her return to Oakland, she expressed contempt for the dereliction and cowardice of Congress (“always excepting Lee and Conyers and a few others”). “But we must face it,” she said. “We cannot walk slow so that they can catch up. How many parents will get a knock on the door while Congress is farting around? We have no opposition party. We, the people, are now the Opposition Party.”

Oakland resident Paul Rockwell is a columnist for In Motion Magazine and Common Dreams.

Gamelan, featuring the intricate orchestral ambiance of bronze gongs, drums and other instruments, performed with dance, song, and shadow and rod puppetry, will take center stage for “A Gathering of Gamelans” at Cowell Theater in San Francisco’s Fort Mas on Center this weekend.

The four-day event will bring together eight separate traditions from Indonesia, Southeast Asia and the Philippines from Thursday to Sunday.

Produced by San Francisco’s ShadowLight Productions, “A Gathering of Gamelans,” will fea ture Bay Area-based metal orchestras (three of them from the Berkeley area), but also bring music, dance and spectacle from Bali, Sunda (West Java), Central Java, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines.

The following weekend, Oct. 20-23, ShadowLight will team up with El Cerrito’s renowned gamelan Sekar Jaya to perform the world premiere of A (Balinese) Tempest, ShadowLight founder Larry Reed’s innovative adaptation of Shakespeare’s final, island-based play of magic and redemption, entwined with Balinese mythic lore and Reed’s own style of shadowplay on an enormous screen, also at Cowell.

The opening two nights of the festival will feature the 10th-century Hindu tale, “The Arjuna-Wiwaha Trilogy” from The Mahabharata, performed in three different regional Indonesian styles. The trilogy tells the story of a warrior, undergoing trials and tempted by nymphs, who must help the gods save the world from demons.

On Thursday, ShadowLight will play “Arjuna’s Meditation,” with guest Balinese dalang, or puppetmaster, I Nyoman Sumandhi manipulating and giving voice (in English and Balinese) to a score of carved leather puppets casting shadows, while conducting the small gamelan ensemble behind the screen.

The second episode of the trilogy will follow, performed by rod puppet dalang Kathy Foley (in English) and the University of California-Santa Cruz Wayang Ensemble with Sundanese gamelan led by master drummer Undang Sumarna.

The trilogy will be concluded in Central Javanese style on Friday night by gamelan Sari R aras (from Berkeley) accompanying shadow puppet dalang Midiyanto’s two- to three-hour English condensation of the usually all-night “Arjuna’s Wedding.”

Former Royal Cambodian Dancer Charya Burt (of Santa Rosa) will present her choreographed tribute to Kh mer dance, “Forever My Ancestors,” accompanied by drummer Ho Chan and his classical ensemble of five players from Long Beach on Saturday. That will be followed by Pusaka Sunda, a West Javanese orchestra based in San Jose, led by virtuoso bamboo flautist B urhan Sukarma and featuring drummer Undang Sumarna, as well as a traditional masked dance.

“A Gathering of Gamelans” concludes with a Sunday matinee. The Thai Cultural Center of the Bay Area (based in Berkeley) will present two gamelans of wind and percu ssion instruments with dances ranging from folk to classical, from Laos through Thailand into Malaysia, and dating to the Kingdom of Siam in the mid-seventh century. Sekar Jaya will present a concert on giant bamboo marimbas (gamelan jegog) from West Bali, led by North Balinese composer I Made Terip. The Palabuniyan Kulintang Ensemble (based in San Francisco), led by Danongan Kalanduyan, originally of Mindanao in the Philippines, will feature traditional dances to an orchestra centered around the kulintan g instrument of eight tuned, suspended bronze gongs.

Gamelan orchestras and music flourished in their diverse forms after the Javanese Kingdom of Majapahit defeated a Mongol invasion during the 13th century, becoming an empire that influenced other cultu res throughout Southeast Asia with the courtly traditions that favored gamelan. The mythic stories enacted by shadow and rod puppets and masked dancers are originally older by at least a millennium.

The influence of gamelan on modern music traces back to Debussy.

“He heard gamelan at the 1900 International Exposition in Paris. It’s easy to see how he incorporated the sense of its impact, especially transparent in ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,’” said Paul Humphreys, head of the music department at Loyola Marymount University. “And Debussy is the most influential modern composer in that more lines come from him.”

Humphreys said that Henry Cowell, a San Francisco native, was influenced by gamelan, as were his students, Lou Harrison and John Cage.

“Cage’s prepared piano is, in a way, an attempt to imitate gamelan on one instrument,” he said. “And the minimalists, from Terry Riley and Steve Reich, were profoundly influenced, as New Zealand composer Jack Body, who has done field work in Indonesia, ha s been.”

The tide has now reversed, Humphreys said, with composers in Bali incorporating other music, especially with African musical ideas, into their gamelan compositions.

Humphreys said, “It’s like what Lou Harrison said, and Lou was one of the most important champions of gamelan innovation outside Indonesia, ‘don’t knock the hybrids; that’s all there are.'"

Contributed photo: The Berkeley-based Thai Cultural Center of the Bay Area will present two gamelans at the festival..

Katrina Benefit with The Cajun All Stars, The Spirit of ‘29 Dixieland Jazz Band, Anne Galjour, Will Durst, Jeff Raz in a benefit for the Southern Arts Federation Hurricane Katrina Emergency Fund at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $25-$100+ available from 925-798-1300.

Night of Spoken Word and Song with Doug Von Koss, Judith Goldhaber, Maya Specter, and others at 8 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Donation $10. Fundraiser for Chaplaincy Institute. 682-5452.

There are a couple of catalpa trees a few blocks from where I live, crowded into a narrow curb strip so tightly they’ve started bulging over the sidewalk. I’d wondered about them for years, and figured they were something planted by a homeowner years ago, for whatever reason. I got a partial explanation from a friend of ours who grew up on that block and still lives there–that rare bird, a Berkeley native of about my advanced age. He said that that part of Grant Street used to be lined with magnolias; the catalpas, another emblem of the Southeast, therefore fit right in. And yes, they were evidently planted by the person who owned the house they’re in front of.

Catalpas are handsome trees that get big—50 to 90 feet—and look splendid in a meadow, in their native home. There are a couple of species back east, Catalpa speciosa, called “northern” or “western” catalpa, and the “southern,” C. bignoniodes. They’re quite similar, with leaf size and flower color being the visible differences and with considerable overlap in those. Some catalpas’ blossoms look pale lavender overall, though classically they’re white with purple freckles in their long throats. The southern tree’s flowers are supposed to be generally more purple than the northern’s. Some of these have a lilac hue that’s fairly startling and can be seen from quite a distance, almost glowing.

The flowers appear in upright triangular panicles, and the trees’ branches aren’t crowded or dense, so a catalpa in bloom looks like an elaborate candelabrum. With their big, soft, heart-shaped leaves fluttering languidly, they have a luxuriant, silken-baroque grace.

Sometimes that grace conceals little surprises. Catalpas are the host of the catalpa worm or catawba worm, a striking black-and white caterpillar that can be a hefty four inches long, with a spiked tail. It’s a favorite fish bait in its home range. Supposedly, users turn the caterpillar inside-out before putting it on a hook, all of which is too disgusting to think about any longer, so you have my permission to close your eyes and think of happy furry puppies. If unmolested by fisherfolks, parasitic wasp larvae, or other micro- or macro-predators, the spectacular caterpillar metamorphoses into a rather more subdued-looking sphinx moth.

Catalpa fruit is rather odd and long too. It’s a sort of enormous dangling green bean, and gives the tree its other common name, “Indian cigar tree.” Back east, where the trees are usually more productive of flowers and fruit than our lonesome pair on Grant Street, the skinny cigars hang on like bamboo windchimes after the leaves fall, and if there are enough of them, they even rattle a little in the breeze.

“Indian?” I don’t know why, except that it’s a native American, and maybe people were thinking of wooden tobacco-store icons. Or maybe it’s one of those inventions that seem to cross the Big Rock Candy Mountain, with its cigarette trees and soda-water fountain, and the notion that before the Europeans arrived, everything on the continent was uncultivated. If a cigar-store Indian had cigars, they must have grown on trees, right?

I’m told that kids actually smoke the beans back East when they’re dried out: break off both ends, light one and suck the other. Or they did before tobacco smoking got to be something people of all ages are supposed to purse their lips and get all scoldy about. (I’m not a smoker; never have been. But I think I’m allergic to that cat-butt face.) Kids used to smoke cornsilk, too, wrapped in a handy bit of cornshuck. I’m trying to remember what, if anything, we used to try smoking in my suburban neighborhood fifty years ago. (That, if you need to be told, was before banana skins.) Maybe we made do with those weird white candy cigarettes … uh-oh. Evil white sugar!!

The best way to tell northern from southern catalpa is to crush a leaf and smell it. Northern has no scent, other than that moist green leaf scent; southern has one, described as “faintly rank.” The pair on Grant Street still have leaves but have dropped a lot, so now’s the time to smell it for yourself. They’re senior trees, and I suspect they’ll be with us for only a few years more, if that. Check them out and remember to look for flowers next spring.

[Editor’s note: In Missouri 50 years ago they were called “lady’s cigars.”]

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 524-3043.

“Weekend Adventures In San Francisco & Northern California” a slide show with Carole Terwilliger Meyers at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library Community Room, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org

League of Women Voters Membership Meeting with a Panel on the November 8 ballot propositions at 5:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church. Buffet dinner is $15. Please RSVP to 843-8824.

“A Global Perspective on Investments in Municipal Water Infrastructure” with Dale Whittington, Prof. Environmental Sciences & Engineering, Univ. of North Carolina at 5:30 p.m. at Goldman School of Public Policy, Room 150, Hearst and LeRoy. 642-2666. www.lib.

berkeley.edu/WRCA/ccow.html

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/

walkingtours

“CaliVera: Days of the Dead Altars Remixed” Exhibition opens at the Oakland Museum of California, Tenth and Oak St. 238-2200. www.museumca.org

Father Roy Bourgeois on Against Torture, School of the Americas and a video “Crossing the Line, a Journey to Awareness” at 7 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. 535 6285. irenendavid@yahoo.com

Spoonbill Migration A display of sculptures and information on how to save the endangered bird from noon to 5 p.m. on the lawn in front of Wurster Hall, UC Campus. cdbydesign@earthlink.net

“Role of the Humanitarian Sector in a Changing World” with Dr. Anysia Thomas of the Fritz Institute at 7:30 p.m. at International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Cost is $5. 642-9460.

World Affairs/Politics Group for people 60 years and older meets at 3:30 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $2.50, includes refreshments. 524-9122.

FRIDAY, OCT. 14

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Cihan Tugal, Prof. Sociology, on “Transformation of Religious Politics in Turkey.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.

BOSS Graduation and Gratitude Gala honoring men and women who have overcome homelessness, disabilities, addiction, and other challenges to turn their lives around at 5:30 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St., Oakland. Tickets $50. 649-1930.

“Cleaning Up Diesel: Fuels and Technologies” a workshop in downtown Oakland sponsored by the Ditching Dirty Diesel Collaborative from 1 to 5 p.m. RSPVP to 302-3316. joel@rampasthma.org

Hills Emergency Forum for residents of Berkeley, El Cerrito and Oakland to reduce the risk of wildland fire, at 10 a.m. at the El Cerrito Community Center, 7007 Moeser Lane. www.lbl.gov/ehs/hef/

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m.

By the Light of the Moon Open mic and salon for women at 7:30 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 655-2405.

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041.

Berkeley Garden Club Plant Sale from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 313 Victoria, off Fairmont in El Cerrito, near the Plaza Bart Station. 528-4940.

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of the West Berkeley working class neighborhoods from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For information call 848-0181. www.cityofberkeley.info/histsoc

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. at the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Light Search and Rescue from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 997 Cedar St., between 8th and 9th. To sign up call 981-5605. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/

fire/oes.html

“The Kindness of Strangers: A Benefit for Rebuilding the Spirit of Community in the Gulf States” with The Cajun All Stars, The Spirit of '29 Dixieland Jazz Band and many others at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $25-$100, available from 925-798-1300.

“Who’s Winning the Evolution Wars?” with Glenn Branch, National Ctr for Science Education, at 10 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Sponsored by Secular Humanists of the East Bay. 848-6137.

“Kids in Creeks” A class for edcators of K-12 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Prospect Sierra School, 2060 Tapscott Ave., El Cerrito. Cost is $25. Sponsored by the Watershed Project. 665-3539.

Spirit Walking Aqua Chi (TM) A gentle water exercise class at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $3.50 per session. 526-0312.

Berkeley Public Library Teen Amnesty Week through Sat. Oct. 22. Teens, bring your high school ID, and the Berkeley Public Library will work with you to clear your library record. 981-6135, 548-1240 (TTY).

Bay Area Youth with LGBT Parents Film “In My Shoes: Stories of Youth With LGBT Parents” followed by discussion at 3 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5. 415-861-5437.

El Cerrito Historical Society features a presentation on two unique residential facilities that supported Chinese orphan children in the Bay Area, at 2 p.m. at the El Cerrito Senior Center, behind the El Cerrito Library, at 6510 Stockton Ave. 525-1730.

Hands-on Bike Maintenance Learn how to do a bicycle safety inspection at 10 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Bring your bike and tools. 527-4140.

Introduction to Rhythmic Improvisation A workshop with Danny Bittker and Jeremy Steinkoler from 2 to 4 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20-$50 sliding scale. 525-5054.

Opinion

Editorials

There’s only one word for the flap on the right about the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court: delicious. And as Dubya tries ever harder to dig himself out of this one, it looks ever more delicious.

Why are the Cons, neo and otherwise, so upset about Harriet? Well, first and foremost, there’s their assiduously cultivated myth that there’s something in the United States like a conservative intellectual. In Europe there are real conservative intellectuals, the ones with the monarchist leanings, but in the U.S. conservatives are mostly wannabes, mostly intellectually second-rate despite their pretensions.

There’s a little group of guys and a few gals on the Boston-Washington axis who have always thought that it was unfair that the smartest people in their law school classes, by and large, turned out to be some form of liberal. These people—mostly from the bottom third of the class—have been working all these years to change the image of conservatives. They’ve tried everything—well-endowed “think” tanks, glossy student magazines which parody academic style, Sunday morning television shout-fests conducted by people who misuse long words—in other words, the best intellectual image-builders money could buy. But with one stroke of a pen young George has re-asserted some of the old paleo-conservative doctrines.

To wit: It’s not what you know (and it doesn’t matter if you learned it at Yale or SMU), it’s who you know. And it’s not what you think, it’s what you believe. Even though it is no longer fatal to your qualifications for a job if you “happen” to be Catholic or Jewish, it’s still deeply relevant to your eligibility if you’ve had the good sense to “choose Christ” as a born-again evangelical Protestant Christian. Not, of course, that those sincere Jews and Catholics aren’t free, really at any time, to make the same important decision which born-Catholic Miers did. Some non-EPC’s are now considered reliably conservative, but not many outside of Boston-Washington. That “neo” in neo-con still counts against you.

Harriet Miers has made all the right friends in her perfectly respectable legal career, even though she’s never managed to snag a judgeship. She’s been the go-to gal when the Texas Bar looked for a hard worker to organize meetings. She’s carried briefcases for the best Texas has to offer. She’s been the managing partner in a big law firm undoubtedly loaded with big egos, a thankless task if ever there was one, and the kind women have traditionally been stuck with. There is no particular reason to believe that her Supreme Court opinions will be any worse from a legal standpoint than those of Scalia and Thomas just because they went to more prestigious law schools.

All those defensive gyno-American conservatives (as Ann Coulter likes to describe herself) are writhing in pain at the idea that Miers’ nomination might have had something to do with her being a woman. But if the triangulation on the choice for this seat is “lawyer-crony-woman,” there are not many other names that pop up. If the criteria were only “lawyer-crony,” a dozen people might have had a shot at the job.

A case could be made that the Roberts-Miers play was an elaborately orchestrated set-up, with Justices O’Connor and Rehnquist, before his death, in on the deal. O’Connor has shown herself to be something of a closet feminist. Roberts was a favorite Rehnquist protégé. One could imagine some sort of quid-pro-quo whereby O’Connor agreed to announce her retirement in time for Rehnquist to see his boy confirmed before he died, in return for a Bush promise to appoint a woman after Rehnquist was gone. If Bush needed therefore to find a woman, Miers was handy and congenial. He could trust her in a way he couldn’t trust any of the several flashier female judges whose names have been advanced by the right.

The abortion issue in this discussion is a red herring. It carries the presupposition that George Bush is deeply and sincerely committed to the anti-abortion sentiments which have been useful to him in previous elections. Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books recently pointed out that the cynical Rove/Bush election strategy has been to put together a coalition of outsiders, especially fringe Catholics and evangelicals. Their beliefs on abortion don’t represent the views of the majority of American Christians, Catholic or Protestant, if you believe the polls, but they’ve added up to enough electoral votes to grab the presidency in the last two elections.

But now it’s a new ball game. What Bush and his controllers now need to be worried about is not the next election, but what might be a whole string of indictments for crimes and misdemeanors that could make Watergate look like Sunday School. In the context of all the legal problems that could lie ahead for them, there’s no reason they should be obsessing about how the Supreme Court will rule on abortion. What they are likely to need in the future is not an electoral college majority, but a crony-controlled Supreme Court which will make sure that they stay out of jail. And if that’s the game plan, Harriet Miers, the go-to gal who can be trusted to take on the messy jobs, is a smart choice. Ideology has nothing to do with it.

There is so much appalling news from the world this week that it seems like a good time to launch a new department of this paper. Since we are now all present at all major disasters by virtue of high-speed media, it can seem churlish to complain about petty annoyances of everyday life. And yet, if we don’t allow ourselves to complain about such things occasionally, our coping mechanisms will soon get overloaded.

It’s possible to convert small irritations into global analysis, though it might be better to keep them at the trivial level. Here’s an example:

Last Thursday we rushed from deadline at the Daily Planet office to a 7 p.m. concert on the University of California campus. Because we had so little time, and hoped to grab a sandwich on our way in, we drove, and resigned ourselves to paying UC’s hefty parking fees in the underground garage next to Zellerbach. Big mistake.

In its infinite wisdom, the UC parking office seems to have fired all of the personable humans that used to collect money from patrons rushing in to concerts. Since we can walk to campus from our house, we hadn’t tried to park in a garage there for a long time, so this innovation might have been in place for a while, but we didn’t know about it. Neither did anyone else in the long line of desperate concertgoers (probably at least 50) who were trying to pay their dues at the underground parking machine when we arrived at 6:25. We barely made it to our seats at 7, minus the sandwiches.

Said machine makes Diebold’s voting machines look slick and professional. (Perhaps they are a Diebold design?) Dollar bills (no credit cards of course) have to be inserted one by one, with many rejected because they’re too old, too new, too crumpled or…? You have to predict how long you’re going to be away from your car, so there was much angst among patrons trying to decide how many encores Cecelia was going to offer, and what the penalty for a wrong guess would be. Many people were unable to understand the poorly written instructions on the machine—we entertained ourselves in the line totting up the number of advanced degrees in the crowd of people who couldn’t cope. Several who had come long distances to attend said they’d never come back to a UC event. To complete the payment, you had to press a button labelled “receipt,” instead of something more straightforward like “get ticket.” Figuring this out added three or four minutes to each transaction.

What’s the Global Analysis?

All too frequently, a technological solution like this one is implemented for what’s not a problem. All of those cheery young folks who used to sell tickets are now out of work, and why? There should be the equivalent of the Oscars or the Ig Nobel Prizes for this kind of abuse of technology. It needs a catchy acronym, something like TABU (for Technology Abuse BUmmer).

A different Global Analysis could be that UC isn’t exactly telling us the truth when it says that we need thousands more parking spaces downtown. The university commands a huge number of parking spaces which are typically empty at night because they’re too hard for the public to use. When the dust settled, it looked to us like it was a sold-out concert with many spaces still empty in the parking garage. Clearly patrons who have had the Zellerbach garage parking experience on previous occasions are now avoiding it, and some others on Thursday seemed to be leaving in frustration when they couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to do.

Now, annoyances like this one could also have been described in two or three cogent sentences without the global analyses, which might have been better. In any event, we’re now offering our readers a new opportunity to gripe briefly in print about similar frustrating experiences. We’ll have a column occasionally somewhere on the opinion pages headed “Gripes,” printed when critical mass accumulates. One paragraph per complaint, no more. It should be fun, or at least therapeutic.

And just to be fair and balanced, we’ll also run “Bouquets,” single paragraphs about something that’s going right for a change. We don’t expect as many of those, knowing our readers as we do, but we might be pleasantly surprised.